The Iced Coffee Hour - Meet The $500,000,000 Real Estate Legend | Ben Mallah
Episode Date: April 30, 2023As a special offer our viewers receive free access to Fund&Grow's Business Funding Masterclass: 5 Steps to Securing $250,000 in Business Credit. Click on the link: www.fundandgrow.com/icedcoffee for t...his amazing opportunity today. Fund&Grow is also extending a special $500 discount for all subscribers! Register your free Bitrix24 account: https://www.bitrix24.com/~5e0c8 NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan https://www.instagram.com/alex_nava_photography Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w TIMESTAMPS: INTRO: 00:00:00 The Roots Of A Mobster: 00:02:15 Adversity Through Childhood: 00:05:36 Ben's First Business: 00:07:31 The Inflection Point: 00:16:37 Lessons From The Army: 00:19:02 Managing Section 8 Housing: 00:23:17 Expanding Through 2008: 00:35:10 Retail Real Estate Is Best: 00:45:05 Converting Old Motels: 00:51:47 How To Buy A House Step-By-Step: 00:58:01 Is Buying A How NOW Worth It?: 01:03:33 Bank Bailouts Coming Again?: 01:07:24 Thoughts On Chef Dave Ramsey: 01:14:01 Jacks Finances: 01:15:49 Ben's Finances: 01:21:08 Owning a $30 Million House: 01:24:54 Ben Mallah's Plane Fleet: 01:29:26 The Infamous "Plane Breaker": 01:31:37 Master Negotiater Ben: 01:33:36 Getting Kicked Out Of A Chinese Buffet: 01:34:43 Quitting Smoking: 01:36:39 For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: tmatsradio@gmail.com GET YOUR FREE STOCK WORTH UP TO $1000 WITH OUR SPONSOR PUBLIC - USE CODE GRAHAM: http://www.public.com/graham MY NEW COFFEE IS NOW FOR SALE: http://www.bankrollcoffee.com/ The Equipment used: https://tinyurl.com/y78py5g2 Audio Equipment Used In Podcast: Shure SM7B mics, cloud lifters, rodecaster pro audio interface The YouTube Creator Academy: Learn EXACTLY how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube, rank videos on the front page of searches, grow your following, and turn that into another income source: https://bit.ly/2STxofv $100 OFF WITH CODE 100OFF For Podcast Inquiries, please contact GrahamStephanPodcast@gmail.com *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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I only believe in one type of real estate right now.
I'm thinking about writing a check for $100 million
of paying off $100 million worth of debt.
So you might know Ben Mala as being a $500 million man
who owns a ton of real estate,
but today he is losing $500,000 a month.
Well, now I've got no protection
and now I'm paying $6 million a year.
He's a very successful real estate investor
who grew up in the slums of Rockaway, New York,
and today we're getting an inside look
into exactly what's going on in the housing market,
exactly what he's buying,
and his entire rags to rich's story
on this episode of, make sure to subscribe and hit the like button and comment because it helps us out tremendously.
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Thank you so much, and now let's get to the episode.
This is the coffee table. It's got real coffee in it.
Well, all right.
Welcome to the iced coffee, I have been.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate you coming to Vegas for spring break.
Spring break, baby.
Why not?
You take your kids.
Miami, right?
San Diego, Santa Barbara.
I feel like there's better places than Vegas for that.
The weather is crappy.
The weather is crappy outside, though.
It was freezing.
I froze my ass off and then it started raining on top of that.
Yesterday, I went to the mob museum.
I wasn't that impressed.
No?
I knew more about the mob shit than the museum had there.
How much do you know about the mob?
Too much.
But I grew up around that crap.
You know, my uncle was in it.
People Google my name.
Oh, shit, Ben Miller.
He got all his money from drugs.
It wasn't me.
That was back in, you know, I was like 12 years old.
Yeah.
Anyway, you know, when you grew up in New York, you grew up around all that shit.
Sure.
Every, you name every type of criminal activity.
I've seen it and grew up around it.
And now I'm looking at one.
Now, when you're 12, though, how did you understand with the mob?
Did you, or you just like...
You grew up around it, you know?
Your kids in school, you go to friends, kids of school with your kids.
The parents and the family are all mobbed up.
And, you know, it's really a very ugly life.
He really is.
You said your uncle's in the, he was in the mob.
He was his whole life pretty much.
What was his, like, ranking in the mob?
What was he doing?
I think his name was Benny the Jew.
And he would be like the money guy, you know?
He needed money.
He'd borrow money.
Loansark and gambling.
He did, he moved a lot of drugs, too.
I know that.
I've seen newspaper articles.
And he's probably spent half his life in the state penitentiary or fed penitentiary,
or whatever.
I didn't visit him.
So I'd see him when he got out.
once in a while, you know, but I stayed away from that.
I mean, you know, it wasn't, I always knew that crime wasn't the life of me.
Plus, I'm not a violent person, you know, Godjammer.
You know, all that shit about hurting people and it's just, you know, it's not, it's not human.
Is it, is it close to how it is portrayed in the movies?
Like, you usually see it where they're going to walk.
In real life, it's worse.
In real life, it's worse.
I mean, because you never know when somebody's going to come after year or, you know,
there's no honor.
amongst thieves or crooks and murderers and all that.
I mean, it's just all about money.
You ever have any close calls or hear about anything crazy to happen?
I mean, you know, I was around a lot of crap that went on.
I was too young.
Luckily, I got out in New York when I was 17, and I joined the Army.
So, you know, I did get in a little trouble when I was young.
So luckily back then they would take you in the Army
if you didn't have like a violent criminal record.
and I was not a violent person.
But, you know, I hung out with the wrong crowd,
and you do what you had to do to survive.
I grew up in the slums and really lousy, poor family.
And, you know, so I went to court one day.
And the judge actually recognized me
and remember me from previous meetings that we've had in court.
And I never forget today.
You know, I'm in court.
I was about, I think I just turned 17.
And I got in trouble.
And so I had to,
The bailiff, you know what the bailiff is?
The guy works in the court, takes you away to jail.
So I had the bailiff on my right and had the recruiter on my left.
I set it up that day where I came to court with the recruiter to prove to the judge,
I'm going to the army.
If he permits me, you know, it lets me off.
So we stand in front of the judge and the judge goes,
okay, big shot, what are you going to do?
Because he already knows I'm able to do, the recruiter and everything.
Excuse me.
I swear to God I saluted the judge.
and I said, can we go now?
And that was it.
And that saved my life.
Because otherwise I'd be dead.
I'd be dead or running away in jail.
Negotiating since 17.
Probably a lot earlier than that.
That's interesting.
I ran away from her home when I was 12 years old.
I was a big 12 year old.
Why'd you do that?
Not as big as him, but, you know.
Why'd you run away?
I did.
She's just a laughing and crying.
I came from a very dysfunctional family.
My mother was very abusive.
All right.
and she had mental illness.
And she was basically a raven lunatic
to beat the shit out of you for no reason.
My father, he was pretty much the opposite.
He didn't curse.
He didn't drink.
He didn't smoke.
He didn't stand up to my mother like you should have.
You should have put your bitch in her goddamn place.
But anyway, they got divorced when I was young, blah, blah, blah.
And there was always fighting going on.
And anyway, I got stuck with her.
And, you know, eventually when I was 12 years old,
I was hanging, I wouldn't go home.
I'd stay in the streets or go over at friends' houses.
And, you know, got involved with doing the mischief in the neighborhood.
It was pretty rough growing up in New York, you know,
and far rock away in the projects where it was really sad.
So what was your question?
Why'd you run away?
Run away?
Because it was a horrible place to live.
It was a little shitbox house in a really dangerous neighborhood.
And my mother was nuts.
And she didn't care when you ran away?
She didn't care when I was there.
she was probably happy I ran away
and you know
so you know I did what I had to do
I lived on friends of the streets
I sleep on the train
you know maybe
we had very long rides
on the train in New York
you can get on the train
if I rock away
take it all the way
to uptown Manhattan
that'd be like a two or three hour ride
so you can get three hours of sleep
going that way and going back
before you don't get robbed
you know but um
did no adults see you and just say
like hey where your parents
where you going
No one questioned it.
Back, you know, you got to understand.
I'm 57 now.
Sure.
You know, I'm talking about, I was born in 65.
You talk about 1997.
Sure.
In 1977, throughout the 80s,
New York was a sewer.
All right?
That's why, you know,
Trump was able to do all that crap in the 80s
because everything was garbage.
It was down.
It was crime-ridden.
I mean, the mafia, the drugs, the crime,
every crime you can imagine,
consumed New York.
It was a cesspool.
So, you know, I mean, nobody ever questioned my age when I was young.
It was just something, nobody cared, you know.
And how did you fund your life when you were 12?
I mean, you know, hustling, you know.
Basically, back then we had what we call a tray bag.
You know what a tray bag is?
Back then, things were cheaper.
You could go with $3.
tree means three by the way
you can take three dollars
you know the right house to go to you knock
in the door and you know when you put
the deadbolt lock in the door
it's a hole it's empty
there's no lock in it
there might be other locks but there's
an empty hole there you put your
$3 in a hole and this little bag
comes out with $3
worth of marijuana
but
back of those days you take the bag
papers didn't cost much
and you clean it up, you roll them up, you get five joints.
And you can sell those joints for a dollar apiece.
So now my $3 just turned into $5.
Jamaicans had the whole corner on that market.
And they were pretty generous.
So then you take the $5 and you go back and you get a nickel bag.
You know what nickel bag is?
Assuming $5.
$5.00.
Yeah, cool.
Very good.
This guy's pretty good.
Turn that into nine.
It catches on.
So basically you take the five.
And really, because I would be such a pain in the ass to them,
they would actually threaten me to get away from the door.
I keep looking in the bag and giving it back.
No, I need a bigger bag.
No, it's got too many seeds in it.
No, it's got stems in it.
And eventually, I'd get a bag where I can get 10 skinny joints out of it.
So now my three turned into five,
and my five turned into 10.
And all I had to do was go to the A train and sit in the last car.
Because the eight, on the last car in the New York City subway
where I was growing up,
That's where everything went on.
You ever been in New York?
How'd you know that?
You've been on a subway?
Yeah.
All right.
So the trains are like 12 cars, 10 cars.
How do you know that?
Everybody knows this.
Really?
Yeah, I started smoking around.
I was 12.
Really?
Yeah.
This is like a common thing.
12 years old?
Yeah.
12 is old.
Yeah, that's middle school.
Yeah.
12 years old.
12 is old in New York where I grew up.
And basically you just sell it.
You roll it up.
You sell it in the last car, the A train.
You know, there's always people going to the city,
going to work.
They want to get a quick buzz before they hit the go
work and it was easy to sell and it was pretty safe you know in the train so you transact in the
train pretty much you sit in the last car and loose joints loose joints or i used to do it also in
washington park right by the statute of liberty you know down wall street um i took a job a lot about
my age i took a job as a messenger a foot messenger back then we'd have computers we used to
deliver millions they trusted million kids with millions of dollars of stocks and bonds and deposits to be a messenger
and go all around Wall Street.
You go to that building.
You make a deposit here.
You go to this bank here.
And that's what I do.
And then during lunch, I'd sit in the park
and tell those joints.
So that's how you sustain yourself.
I mean, I hustle.
Eventually, I got up to a pound a week.
Were you worried?
A pound a week?
That was different.
I was already like 16 by then.
I was selling it by the ounce, too,
so it wasn't that hard.
We're not worried about going to jail or like the police.
Didn't that.
One time I got busted on the train.
You know what the cop did?
He took the weed away.
He kept it.
It wasn't like that.
Everything was corrupt when I was a kid.
Sure.
I was born in a cesspool of corruption and criminals.
In New York, everything, you got away with anything, especially if you grieve somebody.
You know, I mean, it was, it's the way it was.
It's all about the hustle, baby, the hustle.
I grew up with pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, all that shit, jewel, burglars, you name it, everything.
Cars is a big thing, stealing cars.
That was a big thing.
where I was growing up.
So you're scraping by when you're around 12 years old.
What about education?
Were you in school or anything like that?
Believe it or not, when I was very young,
my mother was so,
she was nuts and in one of the ways,
but she wasn't stupid.
And when I was very young,
up until about the age of 9 or 10,
from first grade to fifth grade,
I actually went to private school
because she were going there and say,
oh, I'm a poor Jew, can you give us a scholarship?
and let my son in and all this shit.
And then it worked out,
but I had to change schools every year
because part of the deal was they said,
fine, we'll give you a son of free education,
but you have to volunteer at the school and work there.
Well, that fucked everything up, part of my language,
because she was nuts.
She'd come in there, and the teacher would come to me,
and says, Benjamin, you're a nice boy,
but your mother, we can't deal with her.
You got to go, and she'd get me kicked out of school.
But then she'd find another school to take me in.
So I got a good education.
for five years in my life.
And I never went one day to high school.
Eventually, I kind of went to junior high for a little while.
I got back on my father, my sister.
I got it bounced around between Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen.
But, you know, I went to junior high, but I never made it to high school, not one day.
I knew how to get high.
I wanted to go to school and learn for.
Hold on, Ben.
You know what?
Before we go into that, I do have to say that you seem incredibly busy.
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Yeah, and you could set it up.
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Looks terrible.
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And now, Ben, I'll let you talk again.
But why stop at weed?
You mentioned like Pimps and like all these other things.
Oh, yeah.
Why didn't you?
I wasn't a big weed smoker or nothing, you know, I mean, you know, dim and dare, but no, I was warranted the money part of it.
Okay.
You know, but then I saw that if I tried to go expand into cocaine or heroin like my own,
he moved millions of dollars worth of heroin.
If I started getting involved with that,
then it gets very, very dangerous, very dangerous.
It's a whole other world I don't want to be part of.
So I need to go into hard drugs or anything like that.
That's the death sentence.
But by the time you were 16 and moving, like you said,
about a pound a week, like I know that's like a ton.
That is like a four.
Not if you sell them in 61 ounce bags.
It's not really.
Was it highly profitable?
What happened was, you know, I worked down in the village.
where I worked for, I took a job working for a company that was in the clothing industry.
It was, they actually owned chaps by Ralph Lauren.
They own a lot of divisions of different types of clothing, you know,
they had designers and all this stuff and my job.
We didn't have computers back then.
You know what the TELX machine is?
I used to have to communicate with, feed TELX as to a machine.
I would communicate to Hong Kong, Taiwan, career,
and I'd sit like an idiot feeding tapes and running copies for people and running errands.
and I had a job.
But I was around all the designers and the designers in the village.
You know, the people had designed clothes for Ralph Lerrin and all of them.
You know, let me tell you, I've yet to see too many people that were really good artistically
and it didn't indulge in some sort of vice.
Anyway, they all like to smoke weed in the village.
So they used to ask me, hey, you know, we get some good stuff.
Yeah, I can get you whatever you want.
So eventually, you know, each person would end up buying,
me like 16 different people would each end up buying like an ounce you know an ounce wasn't that
big it was a nice little bag rolled up and you know and uh so I have about 16 clients but roughly
give a take and uh once a week they all want to announce and I'd have to go to these divisions anywhere
all over New York to deliver stuff so I do a while do my deliveries until the vice president
find out and then he fired me interesting so you're doing that and then you have the court date
Which then...
Eventually I did something that I shouldn't have.
I did a...
Oh, yeah, the guy fired me.
So I kind of took revenge on the company and got caught.
What was the revenge?
The revenge.
What was the revenge?
They're shutting down my weed business.
The revenge was I got a bunch of big tough guys from Ronkaway to go and help me clean out my desk.
But we accidentally cleaned out about...
other desks too and stuff so
what do you mean by cleaning out desks
you know when you get fired from a job you take your stuff
with you in a box and you get the hell out right
but we did the whole goddamn office we clean everybody out
oh my gosh that was the empire state building too wow anyway so
you know i got caught because i you know i wasn't thinking you know i
figured of course you're gonna know it's the last gotta get fired right
anyway so they put two and two together and i brought a bunch of big giant
African-American guys would be to help me.
And anyway, so I got in trouble for that.
And that's what caused me to really,
I had to really make a decision.
The judge was going to put me in a real jail for, you know,
like an adult for probably 18 months.
And I didn't want to do that.
So I joined the Army.
And the Army stayed by life, you know,
the Army took care of me, sent me to Germany,
taught me, you know, because I got office skills.
I actually hustled real estate in Germany, too,
when I was a soldier there.
How was that?
Because we didn't have enough housing for the soldiers.
So a lot of people had a rent off base, especially if you had a family.
So I hooked up with a guy was like he was Italian, but he spoke German.
Anyway, he would rent apartments to the GIs.
Okay.
So I was like the middle guy between the, we called the, what they called the German market?
There was a word for the, you don't know.
You're Polish.
Anyway, you know, the Germans live in town, and then I would rent apartments to GIs, bring him,
got people that needed apartments to rent.
And then he charged the landlord of fee, the German landlord.
He also charged the Americans of fees.
He double-ended it.
And then he'd give me a couple of hundred bucks every time I rent an apartment out.
So I would always, you know, do that rental thing while I was in Germany.
What do you learn in the Army?
What do they teach you?
I had to kill, no.
I really wasn't like being in the Army.
always had a civilian-related job.
What happened was, long story short,
I went to take the test.
To get in the Army, you got to take a test, you know?
And where you score on that test determines your selection of what types of jobs
you're willing to train you in.
So I took the test the first time.
I fucked it up.
I didn't sleep last night, the night before I was party,
and I went and took a test that you really screwed up.
The guy gives me a list with, like, a few things on it.
You know, probably, you know, like infantry or, you know.
Some dangerous job.
So he said, you know, I know you're smarter than this.
Why don't you take this book, go study it, all right?
Come back in a week and take the test again.
And I did.
So I took the book.
I found somebody to help me study.
We studied the book.
I went through the thing.
A week later, I take the test.
And the list comes to be this long.
And I said, tell me the easiest job that number one will help me when I want to get out and get a job,
a civilian-related job.
and where all the women at?
Okay? Because number one, I wanted to be around women.
Right.
Okay.
And two, I know the women don't work too hard in the Army.
So he said,
transportation's for you.
So I became a traffic management coordinator.
So I learned transportation,
you know, logistics, moving shit around.
It sounds fancy.
What is that job in town?
Basically, it was all types of things.
I worked at airports, moving troops overseas all the time
because we charter airplanes, you know,
and then we'd fill them up with GIs
and send them everywhere.
world. I worked in Germany where I was responsible for container shipments that came in to the port.
We had to keep track of the containers because we had to pay by the day for those containers
to the container companies. So the military would run up a big giant bill. The container were coming
off the ship. We'd pick it up in one of our trucks. We'd take it out to one of our posts.
Then had to come back empty. And I had to track all this shit. I also did military moves where we had to
go to towns and had to call the mayor up and tell them we're coming through and make sure we had
of clearance for the tank so we didn't knock off the side of a 200-year-old building and get a
multi-million dollar bill from the town it was very it was all types of transportation i did and then
i could have stayed that field too you know i might have done well i don't know transportation is big
money so you know i did that for a few years in germany and then they sent me to san francisco
to work in the san francisco airport because that's where we sent to all the guys to the far east
you know, Japan, Philippines, Navy, Air Force, Marines, everybody.
I said, I can't afford it.
It just goes too fucking expensive.
So they said, well, go to Oakland.
All right, I went to Oakland, working at the airport there.
We had Mack flights.
It was less expensive, but very dangerous.
I mean, I thought New York was dangerous.
Northern California back in the 1980s
was probably one of the most dangerous places I've ever experienced.
What made you feel like it was dangerous?
They didn't care.
You could beat the hell out of them.
You could put them in jail.
They didn't care.
And when cocaine and crack hit Oakland, California, it destroyed it.
I mean, it was really sad.
But I got into affordable housing there.
I rented an apartment in a GI building.
We're mostly military guys that worked at a naval hospital lived,
even though I was working at the airport in the Army.
And I rented an apartment.
And the manager there, she gave me 50 bucks a month off my rent
just to pick up the garbage around the building,
which was a lot back to me, 50 bucks.
My rent was 500.
I knocked 50 bucks off.
I already had a three-year-old kid when I got there.
I had a kid when I was,
I had my oldest son when I was 18 in Germany.
And his mother didn't tell me that, you know,
a father was a sergeant major.
So if I didn't marry her, you know,
would have put me in jail.
She was only 16.
Anyway.
So I had a kid.
And then me and her didn't work out
She was a nutcase
So I ended up taking him and living on my own
You know raising him
And to this day he runs my company
Yeah
Was she German?
No, she was American
She was a GI brat
Got it, okay
So basically I got to Oakland
I started helping with the apartment building
You know I got to be the owner
The apartment building
He was a real cool guy
You know he had a whole of fancy cars and toys
And you know he was living pretty good
And I said shit I want to be like him
So basically, you know, the lady, the old lady managed the building.
Well, what happened was, yeah, the old lady who managed the building,
and, you know, I helped her out more and more.
And he started noticing he was doing better.
He was making more money.
I was helping to clean out apartments, helping him getting turned over,
helping him getting rented.
He was making more money.
So I got to know each other.
When you make people money, they didn't want to know who you are.
So she accidentally fell down to fly stairs and I became the manager.
What do you mean accident like accidentally?
Accidentally she fell down the stairs.
There's two-story buildings, one of those buildings with a pool in the middle and a courtyard
apartments and had 50 apartments and she accidentally.
Yeah, he like says that and the corner of his mouths just turned up a little bit when he
says it was a very cloudy day that day.
I don't recall, I was with her.
Wait, so was she fine?
Was she fine?
Yeah, was she was an old lady?
She fell down the flight of stairs.
That happens.
And she could be to be the manager.
anymore. Wow.
Geez.
Happens. The accident
has happened in life. Yeah.
You never know. An accident could happen. Just walking out the door
at his house right now.
Be careful, Jack.
The corner of his mouth.
Anyway.
Nasty accident. So basically I became a manager
and I was in the Army.
And this guy's doing really well.
And then I turn around and I said,
hey, my time's up in the Army. And they actually
offered me $50,000 to
re-enlist for another four years.
But they wanted me to change my job and
going to something real military, like bomb finding or something, mining or some shit.
And they wanted me to go to career.
And I really don't want to do that, especially I'm raising a three-old kid on my home.
So he said, no, no, no.
You stay with me, get out of the Army, come to work for me full time.
I'll pay you what the Army's paying you and then some, and I'll make you rich.
We'll own all kinds of real estate together, and you'll have a great career in real estate.
How long did it take up until that moment to facilitate?
facilitate that relationship with that guy?
Like, was this like a year in the making?
I moved there, let's see, 83 and 86 in Germany.
I moved there in 87.
During 1887 for a year, I work with him.
And then in 88, I got out into military and worked full time for him.
And it turned out he was a builder.
He built a lot of Section 8 housing around Oakland.
And he was also building mansions in the hills of,
of, I don't know if you know Northern California at all.
It was called Lafayette, Arenda,
and all these up in the hills in this real high-end area.
He was a very colorful guy.
And he was real smart.
He was into banking.
He knew all kinds of shit.
But I was the guy to do all his dirty work.
So I get out of the Army, and he says, okay,
and he hands me a big ring of keys.
Like the old jail movies would have a big ring of keys.
No labels on them, no nothing.
He hands me a big ring of keys.
and a 38 pistol.
And he says, here you go.
Gave me the addresses of about three or four buildings
he built around town.
And I had to go in there and assess the situation.
What's vacant?
What needs to be fixed up?
What needs to get rented?
And I did.
And I was real good at it.
And so I learned everything
to know about Section 8 housing.
I mean, because I learned from the housing inspectors.
Then it wants to taught me.
The housing has already taught me
how to run because I do inspections with them.
I learned the rules and filled out contracts and all that.
So I got really good at it.
And then we grew.
And then he made me a bunch of promises and he didn't really keep him at first.
So I said, well, all right, I got married again, another kid.
I'm going to get out of this.
And then the neighborhood turned bad, even worse.
What happened was I saved his ass.
The building we lived in was predominantly rented to Navy people that worked at the Naval Hospital up to hill.
Then the government shut down.
the naval hospital.
Now he was subject to the neighborhood
people. He didn't have
that direct flow
from tenants anymore in military.
So he's sitting there an empty building.
He could have went bankrupt.
But I took my ass down to the housing
authority downtown. I made flyers
up. I put people in my
goddamn car. I drove him over to
the building. I'd take their baby carriages.
I put people in wheelchairs of my car.
I had a station wagon. It was real cool.
I could fold a wheelchair. I put it in the back of the station wagon.
I'd take people and I'd do whatever I could to get that place rented up.
And I did.
So now I became a Section A building.
But he made more money.
It was a rough building to manage.
Right.
And I lived there.
I lived with it.
So I created this really rough atmosphere and I had to live in the middle of it.
So after a while I said, listen, I can't live here anymore.
I got to move on.
You told me we're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
And we need to do nothing.
You're building big fancy mansions while I're in the hood.
And I left them.
And I went out and applied for a job.
with all the experience I had from Section 8,000,
I was worth something in the market.
Nobody wanted to do that kind of real estate.
So I went to some big shot company
that was building big buildings in San Francisco
and had all kinds of affordable housing stuff,
and I took a job with them.
And I got to, you know,
moved up to a lot of with them
because nobody, you know, I mean,
I had experience from the streets.
Yeah.
I didn't know how to just process the paperwork,
you know, with the government all that.
I knew how to deal with the tenants.
I didn't care.
I could deal with a bum on the street
I could deal with anybody.
It didn't matter.
And I could deal with drug dealers.
I could deal with criminals.
It just didn't matter.
I mean, you know,
I had that type of growing up.
I grew up in that shit.
So basically, I took a job at the company.
The company was really good.
It did a lot of big stuff.
I learned a lot.
Work with HUD.
Work with the state.
Work with the cities.
They promoted me and promoted me
and gave me more and more buildings to oversee.
But I realized I was only going to get to that one level with them.
They weren't going to let me in ownership.
Right.
And the money's in the union.
ownership but if you can manage other people's shit you can own your own shit he just need the money
to do it in the financing so i saw it these good old boys they weren't going to let me go any higher
so i was getting a little frustrated with that you know stuck in about whatever i started working whatever
about 30 grand a year i think i was making a hundred when i left and that was a lot of money back
yeah what year was this got to be early 90s right yeah somewhere in the early mid 90s so here i am
i go but you know i oh so i do i was i did save some money
And I started buying little shitboxes in Oakland and fixing them up while I was working for them.
So I was starting to buy my own stuff.
I buy crack houses that were all boarded up.
I buy all the shit on the courthouse steps nobody else wanted because they didn't have the balls to go into the neighborhood.
I mean, there were places where people refused to own property because they were so dangerous.
You ever heard of Black Panthers?
The real ones.
You know, back in the 60s, the movement, you know what?
This is like their deep ground headquarters.
unfortunately they moved away from you know helping the community and black people into a lot of drugs
stuff like yeah blah blah blah anyway it's very dangerous so i started buying on stuff so what happened
the guy that i used to work for reached back out to me he says hey you know i'm losing my shirt
can you come back take over my buildings again i said sure i'm now a management company my brother
came down from new york got his broker's license because he was brilliant and um we opened up in a
real estate office.
Guess where we opened the office up?
Across the street from the housing authority,
we are now the Section 8 landlords go to place
if you want anything to do with subsidized housing or, you know,
or if you know, so we started to do a management.
So we said, fine, we'll take it on for management.
He started paying his fee management.
And then he started saying, hey, you know,
I got some money on, do some deals.
I said, fine.
But you put up the money.
I'll find the deals.
I'll fix them up.
You put up all the money and we'll be 50-50 partners.
And we did it.
And we started just, you know, I started flipping deals.
I had his money.
The guy opened up banks.
The guy had big bucks.
But, you know, so basically we grew, grew, grew.
We ended up with maybe, I don't know,
500 apartments spread out everywhere, more, maybe more.
We bought up because I would, I would, I don't know if the very term to use,
but I would pretty much blockbust something.
I call blockbusting.
I mean, I would buy a building on one street.
and then turn around and fill it up with Section 8
and then get kind of rough
and then everybody else in that street
will want to sell to me.
I go to the next guy and say,
hey, you know, and I tell him my partner,
you know, he bought this bill next door
and you know, it's going to get bad here.
You better sell now before it gets worse.
So we end up buying a whole land and block from everybody.
And I did that in Stockton, California.
I did in Oakland, you know,
so we bought up a lot of stuff.
But then he got older and then I knew I didn't want to stay in California.
I met my first by my present wife and I didn't want to start a family in California
because we lived on the top of the hill I grew I started the bottom of the hill and as I made more
money I moved to the middle of the hill and I got to the top Scarline Boulevard but you're looking
down on the fucking hood who the hell wants to be the king of the hood so I said we gotta get a
California you know I was the lawsuits were killing me they'd see you for no reason out there
especially you're a landlord the politics the crime I hate it I don't want to raise them with kids
And by then, I'm already raising two kids by myself.
So we both decided, let's go to Florida.
You know, I ended up in Florida after my whole tour of duty in California.
I did a tour of duty in Germany.
Well, first I did a tour of duty in New York growing up or served time,
call it what you like.
Then I served time in California.
And then from California, I went to Florida.
And that's my life story.
Now you know.
And did you continue working with this other guy?
We did some stuff together,
but I ended up buying him out
because you got kind of old
you don't want to work anymore
I didn't want to get involved.
How are we able to buy him out?
Did you get a loan
against his portion?
By the time we got to Florida
I had enough money to either
I could, we always refinanced
every time we bought a building.
We bought a building, we fixed it up,
we refinanced and we got all the money back.
So now we're into the building for nothing.
Well, sometimes we'd take more than we got.
We'd end up pulling out millions of dollars
out of properties
after we just bought it, fixed it up,
and refinanced it,
depending on how much, you know, equity we built up in it by fixing it up.
The management's a big key to that because, you know, a lot of people don't manage their
property is right.
Okay, they spend too much money.
They don't charge enough rent to the market.
And that, you know, the N.O.I determines what the value of the property is.
So we build up the N.
We refinance and make money on the deals.
And borrowed money is tax-free money.
Did you know that, California?
You knew that?
Yes.
Oh, very good.
Jack's a homeowner.
He's a homeowner.
He's a homeowner.
He's a homeowner.
Congratulations.
It's been like a year and a half.
Year and a half.
So, you know, you can borrow money all the time you want, put it in your pocket,
and it's not going to be a taxable event until you sell a property.
So there you go.
That's my story.
I'm sticking to it.
Then I bought him out, and I was my oldest son.
How much was it to buy him out?
He came to business with me.
We own like two buildings together.
And whatever we determined, the market value was,
with executive position, you know, I just bought it from him.
And bought him out, wrote him a check.
You know, I had money by the time.
I left California because I clashed out.
$10 million?
Five million?
No, it wasn't that much.
I owned him a couple of million on each building.
We have like three buildings.
All together was a couple of million bucks.
I took over all the debt.
Yeah.
That was the main thing.
It was a lot of debt.
Right.
All the properties have a lot of debt on them, you know.
And then how did that expand through the 2000s real estate bust?
Because that must have...
After I got rid of him, I bought up the shit of everything I could.
Yeah.
I mean, when I came to Florida, I bought up everything I could.
And then I kind of...
It wasn't a mistake, but I did dib and dab in Texas in the Houston
area. Problem was,
I bought in Houston, then Katrina hit.
And when Katrina hit, everything
from New Orleans and all that shit
floated into Houston and fucked it all
up. But I bought a thousand
apartments in Pasadena, Texas,
on one block once. A thousand apartments
all in one block, 10, 100 unit buildings.
I thought I was stealing it. It paid 17 a door.
But there's a reason why.
All money,
all cheap prices, the reason why it's cheap.
I learned a lot when I was in Texas.
But my oldest son was already, he drunk out of college.
He was in college material.
You know, none of my boys were except this one, hopefully.
He came to work for me.
And he already started working for me in Florida, managing departments.
So I sent him to Texas, and he bailed my ass out by living there and running everything.
And, you know, so that worked out.
We did a lot of shit in Houston, too, and we got to hell out.
But I did a lot of stuff in Florida, all up and down.
Florida and back then it was money to make because you could buy shit for 40 and 50 a door
you could raise the rent you can fix the place up you can trim your fat and the expenses
and you can increase your NWI and a place will be worth 70 or 80 a door told about the numbers
so that's basically we did and we've done thousands of them I can't even count I mean I have a
resume I stopped even adding on to it so we did apartments our whole life all right we did and then
we graduated from the low-income shit to B class and then
And we never really did a high A class.
That was always too expensive.
It didn't make sense.
It didn't make sense.
It was too much to run them.
And then what happened was, when I married my wife, her, I inherited her little sister and raised her like my daughter.
She wanted to go to school for the hotel business.
All the boys were in an apartment.
She wanted to try hotels.
Fine.
She got her master's in hotels.
We stole, we took her and the professor, who was brilliant, our teacher at school.
We stole them from school.
and we bought a hotel
and then we bought another
and then we bought another
and now we had half a dozen hotels
and then this guy was so small
we didn't care we'd buy anything
Marriott's holiday ends
he didn't care he was brilliant
so we grew in a hotel business
but apartments dried up
we couldn't afford everybody got in the apartment game
so now here we are we can't find
no deals on apartments anymore what are we can do
we're selling our shit off at the top dollar
we're making money we're getting 1031 into
and hotels are tricky because they're a business
They're not real estate.
It takes up a lot of your time,
there's a lot of responsibilities,
a lot of moving parts.
So we started going into retail.
So we started buying shopping centers up.
I hope preferably grocery anchor type.
You know,
so we started buying shopping centers
and then we bought up a shitload of now.
We own Publixies with Dixies.
Then I started also looking at,
well,
I want to slow down a little
and get part of my,
you know, it's all about adjusting a portfolio.
I'm sitting here with 25 assets
I have to manage it all times.
So here I am getting older.
I don't want to blow up
in the management side of it.
I like the way it is.
and just my kids running it.
Let me buy some retirement assets.
So I started buying some Home Depot, some lows,
you know, big, big name companies,
we have nothing to do.
It's a triple net.
You know what Triple Net is, right?
Very good.
Okay.
We'll be a test later.
So I started buying some triplets,
and I diversified my portfolio.
We just sold out of our last apartment building.
It's not that long ago.
We sold the Starwood for $91 million.
He said, well, take everything.
He took all my...
Who bought it?
The guy, Barry,
from Starwood Capital out of Miami.
He's a big company. Starwood Capital.
They sold Starwood to Marriott.
Wow. So he does a lot of affordable housing.
He took all our affordable housing away from us,
and then we 1031 into some more big retail stuff.
And I still got a little piece I've got to buy.
But so, you know, I'm always doing the 1031.
I'm always looking before the 1031,
so I'll have it lined up.
And a lot of times, if I find a really good deal
and I don't want to miss it, I'll do a reverse 1031.
You know what that is?
I don't know.
what it is.
I don't know.
How much more one of you smoke today?
What?
I'm just kidding.
I think it's probably the opposite of a time.
Okay, so basically reverse 10-20-or.
You know reverse-10?
I actually, I've never heard of it.
Okay, reverse 1031 will save your ass.
All right?
Basically, if you know you're going to sell something.
All right?
And you know you're going to have to replace it.
And you have tremendous gains on there.
And you don't want to pay it.
You want to defer to tax.
What you can do is you can go out and buy the replacement property before you sell.
You have six months.
It's still a six-month-month-rule.
So instead of having six months to replace it, you've got six months to sell your property because you're already acquired to replace from property.
Of course, you're going to have to come up with the money to do it.
But if you know you're going to go sell something for $10 million, why wait until you sell it and just start looking?
You're under the clock looking.
Clock's ticking.
Don't.
If you got the money, do it beforehand.
Do a reverse 1031.
Now, what happens when you sell your property?
You get all the money because you already replaced it.
Right.
Reverse 1031.
Interesting.
That's what I've done many times.
So I'm always looking for the next deal because whether or not my property is sold yet
or not, I want to cover that 1031.
And I don't want to be on the clock, you know, ticking on me.
But this also assumes you have the cash on hand to be able to buy something else.
You got out the cash on hand to buy the replacement property before you sell your own property.
But, you know, you can finance it.
Yeah.
What are you buying now?
Because I'm actually, I'm looking at commercial now for the first time ever.
So I got some cash.
and saving the last few years.
I wanted to buy a triple net,
something here in Las Vegas.
Everything right now is trading
about six to six and a half percent.
Doesn't seem like it's worth it.
Because I could get 5.2 right now in treasuries.
So where's the upside?
Right now we're in a weird market.
Yeah.
And I don't like to get too political,
but I think the government is totally fucked up everything.
I mean, you jack the interest rates up,
and now we've got banks falling apart
because they bought into treasuries
and all those other stuff that ain't working.
what it was. So it brings the value
to banks down. You heard about the bank thing going on
now? That's well because the interest
rates. Interest rates control the world
and everything. They control lines of credits of businesses.
They control people buying homes.
They control businesses, commercial
property. They control everything. So right now we're
in this weird zone. Everybody that
owns real estate, including me,
I got a few hundred billion for sale right now. It's going
to the market. I don't want to swallow the fact
that I need to raise my cap rate
because it don't make sense.
If you pay the bank's 6% interest or more and you get in a six cap, there's no goddamn profit.
You're working for free.
There's no purpose of important being in real estate.
You get a 6% on your down payment, big deal.
Like you said, you go get a treasury for that.
You go get a tax-free muni bond, even better.
But now the crazy thing is I'm looking at properties.
I'm calling them up, and they say we already have two offers on it.
And so where are the offer is coming?
1031.
1031.
Right now, the only business that's keeping real estate deals going to 1031 deals.
That's the only thing keeping them going and keeping the prices down.
Because all the people in California sold all that shit and made all that money,
they don't want to pay millions of dollars out to the government for taxes.
They get a 1031, it still pays.
Even though they're not going to be making money in real estate,
they can be saving millions in taxes.
I just did my tax return.
I don't know how I made money in 21, but I did.
You know, COVID was over.
You're going to come back.
Anyway, long story short, I would definitely 1031 that paid a government millions of dollars
of taxes.
So basically, the only real estate, if you want to make money right now in real estate, you're going to get your hands dirty.
And the only way you're going to do that, and I'm just telling me what I'm doing.
Because I like to see people make money.
You know, I don't understand why a lot of real estate guys hide all the time.
Oh, no, nobody knows what I'm doing.
It's enough for everybody.
Okay?
Everybody should, imagine if everybody's succeeding in life.
Imagine if everybody helped everybody with a great world there would be.
You know, guys like him would have a purpose in life.
Yeah, I keep telling them.
I keep telling them.
So basically, this is what we're doing right now.
And you should try to look at it and do it yourself if you can.
You got to, I only believe in one type of real estate right now.
Not office buildings.
They're getting crushed.
And you can't repurpose them.
If you try to turn them into apartments, it's a nightmare.
Your miles are tent a building down and rebuild it.
With the zoning and the plumbing and the electrical and the bathrooms and the kitchens, it's a nightmare.
I've seen guys do it and they lose their shirts.
All right.
So you can't, offices are dead.
Everybody learned from COVID.
You don't need to work in big office buildings.
It's full of people anymore.
You can work at home.
You can work at your car.
This guy probably works on the toilet with his laptop.
Called the WeWork.
So basically, you know, offices are out.
I won't look at them.
All right.
Appointments are still too expensive
because everybody and their grandma
got in the apartment business.
Why?
Because it's easy.
You give somebody a place to rent.
You collect a fucking rent.
If something breaks,
you're responsible for you fix it,
and what else is there to do?
All right? Simple.
All right.
So apartments are still way overpriced.
Plus, because the interest rates being so high,
and people are at an all-time low for mortgages right now,
and nobody's buying houses.
Trust me, I know.
I got a $12 million house.
I just lowered the price down to 10.5.
That's yours?
Is that the house I went to?
No, no, no.
You went to my new house.
Yeah, that's the beach house.
Got it.
I bought a speck house to fix up a mansion on the water.
At the hottest time in the market,
by the time I fixed the goddamn place up,
they started jacking the rates up,
and the house of market crashed.
So basically, rent is still going to maintain because people aren't buying houses.
They have to rent.
Well, supply and demand.
If there's a big demand of tenants, then the supply is going to be cost more money.
Simple.
So you can't find any decent apartments right now.
Okay.
The only thing I'm looking at is what I call, you might call it essential, but I call it
essential, but I call it necessity retail.
Hair, nails, food, Chinese to go, take out, you know, anything.
that's necessity. Anything
Amazon, the internet can't give you.
Okay, so I'm buying up grocery store
shopping centers or
you know, essential shopping centers with
stuff like that in them. Yeah. Find them with
some empties that have mismanaged or some old
mom and pop type places. Put a little
lipstick on them. Make them look like a nicer
place for people who want to come shop.
Make it look better for the business owners. Fix
the parking lot, fix the roof, put a little paint on
it and fill the empty spaces.
Why? Because when you buy them,
the empty spaces are free. You buy
on a cap rate. If you buy something, you're buying it based on what the income is. You know why?
The cap rate. If it's got empty spaces, there's no value in those empty spaces. You're getting real
estate for free. So you got to go out and find some distressed retail. And then you have to
figure how to rent it. You know, they'll still sit around and find an agent that specialize in it,
put up a nice sign, reach out to companies. You know, we do. We call call. We just scored with a company
called Markle's Pizza.
They want to rent three locations from us
in our shopping centers all over town.
You know, you look at who's growing,
what companies are popping up,
but stick to necessity.
What Amazon can't sell you
and what you can't buy online.
All right?
Stuff like that.
What do you think of doctors' offices,
law offices?
Medical is a specialty, yes.
Medical, you can do well.
But it's all about the demand.
Is there a demand in that location for medical?
Every shop and center I have.
has a dentist, has a hearing-a-gay guy,
has, you know, certain type of medical, you know,
things that people like, you see him in retail places.
Medical office buildings can do well,
but you've got to make sure you can keep them full.
The problem with medical right now is
a lot of doctors have given up their private practices.
Why? You know why?
They can't afford the frigging malpractice insurance.
Insurance has killed the doctor's business.
So what they do is they have to go under the umbrella of a hospital
and typically they'll move in wherever the hospital's at
and get, you know, where they're all located
and they'll feed them clients and they'll protect them.
So you've got to be careful with medical.
Medical's great if you could keep it full
and there's a need for doctors
to want to have a business in that area of practice.
Aaron, he's out of the room,
but Aaron took me over and showed me a technical school
when they teach nursing.
Okay, right near our house.
Schools are great, but you have to,
check the underlying
money that's behind the company.
Is it traded on the stock exchange?
Is it a small company?
Is it a big company?
How their income is?
You know, you gotta really be careful
because, you know, you're talking about big,
some of these places have to pay you $50 grand a month.
Right.
Well, if you're counting this guy to pay you $600
grand a year and rent, you better make sure that
company's making money.
And, you know, they're not some mom and pop, Ricky,
you think it's going to go out of business.
So, you know, you have to check the business's
assets.
Sure.
And make sure that they're strong before you rent to them.
And what sort of cap rate do you look for on something like that?
Because it's got to be at least an eight to even make sense right now.
I mean, you know.
And then it's like, is it worth it if you could get five and a half percent.
Let's just say guaranteed right now.
Is it worth it to take the risk for eight?
A water boy.
What's up?
Is he the water boy?
The order boy?
Oh, you're on water boy.
Yeah.
I got this for myself because I used to drink it, but here you go.
I hope I could trust you.
Have you opened it yet?
I did.
I don't know where it came from.
Anyway, came back to what you were saying.
Basically, what were you saying?
Is it worth it?
Is it worth it?
Okay, what are you working?
Cap rates, it's a market.
You know, everything's a market.
Right now, this is the market we're in.
You used to pay four cap for a Starbucks.
Right.
Now you're getting for five and a half, maybe six.
I haven't seen six.
Not here because you don't pay state tax.
Correct.
But if you go to a taxable state, you'll see it.
Fair enough.
Yeah, that's true.
So basically, cap rates are going up.
What do you do?
You sit around and you're going to have to,
you're going to have to ignite, put a fire under their ass.
If I see a Starbucks right now and they're asking six cap, okay, and you're not selling,
I'm going to offer them seven.
You got to get in there and now you got a bargain.
You got a lowball shit, basically.
Now's the time to lowball and make the person realize I'm going to sit on my ass and make believe
I'm selling, or am I really selling?
That's what you've got to do right now.
So I underbid shit.
I lowball shit by at least 25%.
Okay.
If I see a nice.
product. You know, cap rates are based on
ten equality and how long the lease goes
out, what your responsibilities are,
you know, and things
like that. So what you want to do is you want
to get in their bargain right now and try to earn
a good deal because it's not going to be handed to you,
not in this market. Or do you think it's better to wait?
You've got to have to wait if you can't make a deal, you got to wait.
Waiting is something that is inevitable.
But do you think that you could be more aggressive, let's say,
let's say but eight months
from now, you could be more aggressive than you can
today. Do you think things are going down?
in a sense that, you know, sure you could bargain shop today,
but you could better bargain shop a year.
The point is, but what are you going to do from now till then?
It's on your ass and do nothing?
Treasuries.
If you're making 5% guaranteed.
That's not working.
I got to work for a living.
I got to wake up every day and I've got to find another deal.
Sure.
I got a portfolio.
But for anybody else out there who has the luxury.
You should always be trying because the least it's going to do
is going to give you the experience.
And you're not going to be afraid.
And you're not going to learn a lot of shit.
I learn shit every day.
Okay.
You're going to get in touch
and you're going to network with brokers.
You're going to know who's selling.
What's going for this?
What's the Walgreens going for right now?
You got a Walgreens over here at a sixth cap.
But this guy, he's willing to take a seven.
You know, you're learning the market.
You're making offers.
It's part of the experience.
You know, real estate is an experience.
What does he do?
I just sit here and still trying to figure that out.
He shows out.
This guy roped you in.
You're paying this guy for a lot.
I've still kind of.
We've been trying to figure this out for a while,
trying to get to the bottom of this.
I don't know.
I'm not.
The thing is, you should be a model.
You guys talking about...
Honestly, you got that look.
You know, I'm not gay, and I don't go that way, but who cares to do.
You guys are talking about commercial real estate.
This is something I have, I am the...
Talk about residential.
That's the thing.
For me, it's like, I'm 24.
I just got my first property.
I'm just getting started.
So I'll let you guys do what you do with commercial because I don't have much...
There's something else you can do out there right now.
You got a lot of big balls for doing it, which I'm looking to do them.
Because I've got big balls.
At least my wife doesn't say that, but I think I do.
Converting.
hotels and motels that got killed in COVID
and can no longer survive.
The old mom and pop shitty wants.
There's always a need for affordable housing.
Seniors love them too.
You could take two shitty hotel rooms,
pop a door in the middle,
rip out a bathroom, pop in a little kitchen.
You guys have a nice one-bedroom apartment,
but you've got to buy it cheap.
And you can't spend a fortune fixing it up.
So that's something I'm really interested in doing.
I'm going to call it Studio City.
All right, take all these old shitty hotels
where the hookers go and the druggies go get rid of them clean them up picks them up and and make them affordable
decent housing for people yeah what do you think of affordable work spaces it does seem like there is a
need for like a we work where people could rent out their own space and it's coming back yeah it's coming
back because nobody nobody who wants to rent a tremendous amount of office space anymore so this
whole community community whatever you want to call it works but it's got to be location
it's all about the right location you got to have those type of people in that location you know
the hipsters and whatever they are.
People that want to hang out and have coffee with other people that they don't know.
And I don't know.
Yeah, marijuana is legally.
You can have a smoke room, you know?
Sure.
So for the average layman, the person listening right now,
if they're either just getting started in real estate or maybe on like their second or third or fourth property,
what would you encourage them to do if they're buying like residential real estate that they're planning on rent?
If you're paying rent, you should always consider what can you buy for the money you pay them rent.
All right.
Everybody should try to get approved for an FHA loan if it's your first time.
And don't buy a house.
All right, you're 24 years old.
Do you buy a house?
Yeah.
How much income does it bring in?
38 maybe.
I don't know the exact numbers, to be honest.
Jack rents at all the bedrooms.
Yeah.
I moved in.
I almost thought that.
So you rent out your bedrooms.
And what services are included in these bedrooms?
What services?
Some I know prostitution is legally.
Some I rented out furnished.
Some I didn't.
It just depends.
You rent them out with like women?
No, no, no, no.
I rented to my friends.
So it's not a whorehouse.
It's my friends.
Your friends?
Yeah, yeah.
So it's like an orgy.
Yeah.
Okay.
I understand what you're doing.
You're renting out the bedrooms.
That's all.
That's cool.
Yeah.
But, you know, that only take you so far.
You know, but typically what you want to do is, you know, a person out there that
qualifies an FHA loan wants to buy a fourplex.
Okay, especially if you're paying rent.
Because at a minimum, even with today's rates, you should be able to live free.
Where the other three are,
are paying enough to pay all the bills and everything and you don't pay for anything.
So you get an apartment for free, all right, which you normally save somebody $1,500, $2,000 a month.
Or, and then eventually you can say, well, screw this and rent your own apartment after a year.
You can do that.
And then you have four tenants paying.
And then you go out and buy, do it again.
You can do it a triplex.
You can do a fourplex.
You might be able to cash flow if you find the right deal.
You think that makes sense in this market?
It makes sense in any market.
You got to find a deal.
Real estate is all about finding.
the deal. It's like digging for buried treasure. You know, you're going to get a metal detector
and find a metal. Okay. That's what real estate's all about. And once you find a deal,
everything else is simple. You find a deal. You figure out how to raise the money, whether you qualify,
you're finding somebody to help you. It's finding the deal is where you make the money.
What's interesting to me is what you were saying about load balling? Because for me, I peruse
Zillow and everything and I see like what stuff's selling for. I see what they're asking. And I'm just like,
okay, well, this doesn't even make sense. Because I bought a year and a half ago, the price was a lot
lower. The rate I got was smoking. You look for the stuff that's not selling. You go to the
MLS and you look for everything that's been sitting on the market for over 90 days or even 60
if you're wanting to get ballsy. If it's sitting on a market and ain't selling, better than get
your offer than no offer, right? That's exactly what I did. And then the worst thing that's going to
happen is, you're going to find out what their rock bottom is. They may not sell it for the shitty
offer you made them. They might be here, you might be here, but you might find a place in the middle
to meet, but at least you'll find out what they're willing to take when you lowball them.
So it pays the low ball.
And then terms got a lot to do with it too.
You come in there and you're all kinds of strings attached.
Oh, I need 30 days to look at the place and inspect it.
And I need the financing contingency and I need this and I need that.
They're going to say, I ain't waste my time with you.
You got too many ways to get out of the deal.
I got a guy over here with cash ready to make a deal.
So contingencies can really screw up a deal too.
You want to give them clean terms, quick clothes, you know, as best you can.
and that's it, hard money.
Maybe it's worth, if you're risking $500 on something to go hard, you know, to tie it up.
That's interesting.
So the property I live in right now is cash flowing based off of all the rent.
How much?
$200, $300, $300.
I don't know the exact number.
I got a great mortgage rate, though.
2.8 fixed.
That's great.
Yeah.
That's great.
And what's interesting is I probably...
How many people are written one room?
You're not written to...
No, no, no, one person per room.
Thank God.
Oh, my God.
It's a five...
I'm picturing him with bunk beds.
No, no, no, no, he's got the, he's got the Las Vegas hostel going here.
He's got five bunk beds.
That would be smart.
He's got big number one, bed number two, and he goes around, wake up, give me a hundred bucks.
It's a friend time.
You know, you'd like this.
I was renting out three.
It's a five bedroom.
I had one room.
Three other people were renting other rooms.
And then the fifth room was on the, the only one on the bottom floor.
I Airbnb beat it a couple of times.
And it had a lock on the outside.
It had a lock on the outside.
It was a devil on the outside.
I don't know why the previous owners had that, but I had to remove that, of course,
before I had an Airbnb guest stay there.
But that's besides the point.
What I was trying to say was this house,
I was shopping for probably about six months.
And of course,
the real estate market was going up when I was shopping.
It was that time.
Rates were still low,
which was nice.
And this was the only property
that entertained my offer.
And this is also the only property
that I offered less than what they were asking for.
Every other property that I was sending an actual offers for,
I was initially offering more.
That's the house where everybody got killed in, right?
Which one?
The house everybody got killed in.
Which one?
The one I bought.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
That's why I got a deal.
But it was the only,
it was the only property that actually entered the amount.
It was less.
It was the funniest negotiator.
He would call me and be like,
Graham,
I'm 10 over asking right now.
Like, what happened?
Called the owner and he said,
he had another offer.
And so I'd offered more.
Like,
you were calling him to bring down the price.
I had no idea.
I had no guidance.
So I was telling him what to do.
Let's get down a basis.
Yeah.
All right, basics.
Yeah.
And basis.
You know what basis is?
Basis.
Basis.
Okay.
No,
basis.
Baseball.
No,
Not does that basis.
Your basis of real estate.
What you paid for it.
Okay.
All right.
So you bought the property for how much?
$589,000.
Holy macaroni.
$5.89.
$5.89.
How much money you put down?
20%.
20%.
20%?
50% of $5.000 is what?
$125,000.
You got tied up in this house.
You owe to bank another $460 or something, right?
Yeah.
All right.
So how much is your mortgage tax insurance?
PITI is $23.80.
All in.
Sorry.
It's like 23, actually.
All in.
P.I. Oh, so if we're talking variable expenses as well.
I'm talking about what do you pay for every, is your mortgage taxes, is your payment every month
including your taxes insurance? Yes.
All right, what's your payment every month to the bank?
It's like 2295. $2,900. $2,900.
Oh, you're smart. You're locked into a good low rate.
You got $2,300 going out to the bank every month, all right? How much you bring it in?
38, probably.
38, 38, 38 for 23 is what, 15?
Percent?
No, $100 a month.
How much you're bringing in a month?
On the house?
You're collecting how much, $3,800 a month in rent?
You're paying out $2,300.
Yes, so it's $1,200.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
$3 and $5 is $8.
He said $38, didn't he?
Yeah, I said $38.
Okay, so if the math are doing is $23 to $38,000, yeah, it'd be $1,500.
$1,500 a month.
Who's paying the utilities?
You?
I pay everything.
How much utilities cost?
You water sewer garbage?
It probably brings me up to $35 in monthly expenses if we're talking variable expenses.
What about cable, internet?
Who's paying for that?
All of that.
How much your expenses?
You got water, you got sewer, you got garbage.
You got $400.
You got electric, you got gas.
You got cable, internet, sewer.
I mean, a landscaper?
You paint a landscaper?
Yes.
Or you motor one yourself.
I have a landscaper.
It's probably realistically $35, $3,600 per month is what is costing me in total with variable expenses.
But everything.
Yes.
Utilities, landscaper.
Is there a pool?
Yes.
Pool cleaner included?
Yes.
So you're into this.
You're collecting 38 and you're paying out how much?
35.
35.
But you live there for free.
Yes.
Actually, I did add a landscaper recently, which is $180 a month, so that might, it might be $37.
All right.
You're living there for free, basically.
You're not cash flowing.
No.
You're living there for free.
Which is saving you a couple of grand a month, probably, at least.
Or sleeping in that room where all stuffed animals.
A month-to-month basis, I'm cash-filling.
I did used to live in that room.
Yeah.
I know I can tell by the stuffed animals.
But if we include other things.
I hate to see what's in your room, tubby.
Like Big repairs, CapEx and all of that stuff, I'm definitely like.
He's got a refrigerator in his room.
Wait, wait, wait.
Okay, so let's backtrack.
You gave Jack great advice.
So what you're saying is, so, for example, my wife and I, I'm married if you could believe it.
She has my condolences.
Okay, so my wife and I.
It's okay to be fat, but you can't be fat and poor.
Dude, I'm loaded.
He's loaded?
Yeah, you're loaded all right.
You're full of it.
You're loaded up.
Like an 18-wheeler.
My wife and I think are in the first position that that you mentioned, so I think I want to go back
to that and reiterate.
So we're looking to buy a house.
We have a bunch of money stashed away now.
So you're telling me don't buy a house?
Is that like you're telling me don't buy a house?
Listen, it's different if you've got a family and kids and all that stuff.
I'm talking about a young person with no responsibilities.
It's 24 years old.
You ain't no kids, do you?
No.
I don't have any kids.
You're gay, aren't you?
Yeah.
I figured that.
So, you know, he ain't got no kids.
a 24-year-old starting out
should try to buy something where he's going to have
you know, make some, you know, live for free
at least, or cash flow.
I mean, if you're stuck with a wife and kid,
you ain't got kids, do you?
No kids.
Thank God for those kids.
Anyway, I mean, it's different.
You got a woman to answer to, you know?
It's different.
Or you tell her, listen, let's not buy the house right now.
We're not ready.
But you're loaded, so what do you care?
I'm talking about people that ain't got money.
I'm telling Alex to wait.
Wait.
Now's a good time.
It's very expensive.
that, but now the price are coming down.
But guess what?
His rent is so affordable.
It's way cheaper to rent.
We're looking at prices now.
Like what Alex is currently paying,
they wanted to raise his rent like $300 a month.
He did get a crazy rent.
Yeah.
So I said, let's go and take a look at a lot of what we're in a terror department
than a normal person.
Renting to him is like written to three people.
Well, so he gets rid of the security deposit.
But we're looking at the other places for rent.
They're cheaper and bigger and in a nicer location than what he's currently spending.
Because everyone who can't sell is deciding to rent right now.
So I think rental prices are so cheap.
But now they're trying to lowball.
People don't want to sell.
Look at what's going to steal on the market.
If it's sitting on the market, it ain't selling,
and then you've got to come in for the kill.
You always stop poking the bear.
Yeah.
And saying, hey, what's this bear going to do?
I mean, that's the way it is.
But I can see him in a double wide.
Maybe you can make that a triple wide trailer.
Exactly what you're saying was the exact same case,
low balling and it had been sitting on the market.
It was the only one that worked out.
I mean, the market's going to turn.
We're going to see, listen,
foreclosure hit in the, I've,
I've never seen.
It always starts with the big giant deals first.
I'm reading articles about guys that are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars just gone.
Banks are taking their hits today.
Every day I get a message or a story, a true story, you know, about a bank just took $60 million, $120 million loan.
That's where it starts.
The signals are there, and it starts at the top.
And then it starts trickling down.
Eventually, everybody, not everybody had a 30-year fixed rate like you did.
All right, a lot of people took their mortgages out maybe 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
All right, they're going to have to either pay them off or they paid it off.
The point is this, anybody that's going to need to refinance is screwed right now, okay, because the rates are so high.
And the properties are not going to be worth what they weren't worth.
So we're going to see a lot of foreclosures.
We're going to see the shit hit the fan.
You just got to keep your eyes out.
I read, it was the Wall Street Journal that reported.
It was 63% of mortgages are currently below, I think it was like four and a half percent.
It was such a low number.
It's good.
And I think 25% were below three and a half percent.
But as time goes on.
But that's assuming they refinance because I think a lot of people just want to be locked in, right?
And just not refinance.
I mean, hopefully they all had fixed rates many years ago when they bought the house.
Right.
But what about the people that took adjustable?
And you know, you're going to see a lot of it.
You see what happened is a lot of houses were bought up by commercial.
people and they didn't take
they couldn't get residential loans
of those long rates for locked in
for so many years. They may have gotten
five years interest rate
low on them. You're going to see a lot
of shit hit the fan and I don't know what the hell
a home builders are going to do because they
made plans two years ago to build, build the
developments and they had projections
and now those projections are out the window
and no, but not only the projections out the window
on the value, notice no goddamn body knocking on the door
to buy them. Right. So you're going to see
the shit at the van. It's just kindly creeping
in, you know, but if you want to get a jump on it, get out there and start knocking on doors.
Hey, what do you want to do?
Your price and properties on the market for sale, but you're not selling.
Here's an offer for a hundred grand less.
I would take millions less right now than I would have took a year ago on a lot of my properties.
I thought I had stuff, oh, I'll sell this Home Depot all day long at a fucking five cap.
Bullshit, I can't get it.
When I take a six, maybe show me some good terms.
You know what?
But 1% cap rate is on a $20 million home Depot?
$2 million, I think, right?
$200,000.
No, $20 million.
$1%.
10% of $20 million would be $2 million.
Now he's going to have me thinking about this.
Anyway, if it's a $5 cap on a $200,000, let's think of $10 million.
You take $10 million.
You buy $10 million, don't know, whatever, McDonald's, whatever.
Home Depot.
You buy $10 million property and a five cap, right?
that's going to pay you
$50,000 a year
and every million, right?
5%.
So 5% of 10 million will be
$50,000, $500,000.
I'll collect $500,000 in rent.
That's a 5 cap.
Is somebody going to pay me $10 million for a 5 cap?
No, I may have to take a 6 cap.
I need to calculate it.
So what is he?
It's hot in here.
It's hot in Nevada.
It's cold outside.
We can't run the AC in here, unfortunately,
because it's picked up by the mics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely not.
What do we do?
He's got to sweat out.
I just talk louder.
It's good.
It's healthy for your skin.
It's exfoliation.
No, I think the cold is more preserving.
You want to take a piece of meat.
It'll go spoiled somewhere, won't you?
But you put an refrigerator last while.
Figure that out, true.
I'm sitting on the rest of the podcast.
One of the issues I see with Vegas right now.
As I'm sure you've seen driving around,
there's a lot of homes under construction.
And a lot of the community, they've stopped building.
Look at the windows.
It's one right dear.
Yeah, exactly.
But they've stopped building because they know they're going to be in it for more than what they
could sell it for right now because building costs are still fairly high.
So it doesn't make sense.
And they don't want to take a loss in these properties because it's a bad comp for the rest of the
neighborhood.
So it kind of screws them on that.
So they're just stopping.
Unless they get a great offer, there's no incentive for them to keep building or selling.
But they have so many houses like half-instructed.
There's another problem to it also.
The banks.
The banks are worried.
The first person to worry is the banks.
And the banks are feeding them money to keep building.
building. Now the bank's going to say, okay, pull the file. Let's see what we got out here.
And they're going to say, oh, shit, these properties are not valued at what we thought
they were going to be valued at. So therefore, the banks are going to get worried. They're going
to be, have too much LTV tied against the property. You know, LTV is right, loan of value, very
good. And the banks are going to come in and say, wait a minute, we got to come up with some
other plan here. What are you going to do? And they could, there's always verbiage in your
loan documents that say the bank has the right to come in and reappeating.
praise the property. And if the property does not work for what it was when they loaned you the money,
cough up, baby, cough up. And if the guy ain't got nothing to cough,
you got to get rid of it. But now I think a lot of people are assuming the Fed's going to step in
because they don't want to be raising interest rates at the same time that the economy is crashing at
the same time the inflation is crying. It's not a Fed issue. The banks don't want to sit there like what
happened to no wait. What happened to no wait and crashed was that the banks are sitting on all this
goddamn properties all these loans and that's the value of the bank the banks only work with loans
those are their assets the bank is sitting there with a 10 million dollar loan and the properties
only worth 8 million or 10 million even that they're 100% leveraged no bank wants to be 100%
leveraged so it's it's it's a crazy market we're in but hopefully you know the top off stop raising
these damn rates and maybe we'll see them stabilized down around 5 or so I think it's reasonable
I think the party days are over.
I was borrowing money yet.
You don't want to know.
I was borrowing money on a one-month LIBOR.
One-month LIBOR was practically zero.
The bank was charged me a point in a half.
I was borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars at one time
at 1.5 or 6% interest only.
Now, couldn't you negotiate that lower?
I was, because I negotiated 0.9 plus whatever SOFER is plus 9.
When?
Recently.
Yeah, but it's a whole other world.
A few months ago.
A year ago.
A year ago.
or two or a year and a half ago, I was borrowing money for less than 2%
on hundreds of millions of dollars of commercial real estate.
Now I'm paying over six because now they got rid of library and said it was crooked and we went to sofa.
Sure.
And it was something called Bisbee.
But sofa rate is like what now?
It's crazy.
Now it's high.
But it used to be point two.
If it's five now, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
But if it's five now and I'm paying a point and a half at top and I'm paying six and a half.
Right now, I guarantee you, I'm paying out from just a year ago.
$6 million more a year in interest payments.
And that's strict interest, no principle.
$500 grand a month I've got to come out of my pocket.
Hey, since you're loaded over there, can you make me a long trip?
All right.
So that's basically the life weird.
What am I going to do?
Right?
No, I'm going to sell off a bunch of toys and sell off some assets that don't make sense,
cash flowing no more and try to get my hands in a bunch of cash because the bargains are coming.
They're coming, believe me.
Now, I take it you're still cash flowing enough.
though because you've got to be around 8%.
I'm working for the employees and I'm working with the bank.
I got 800 employees with the hotels and all the other bullshit.
You know, I'm working for the employees and I'm working with a bank.
I'm not cash flowing.
With little I'm cash flowing probably doesn't even pay my goddamn wife's freaking credit card bill.
I don't know.
But anyway, no, I'm not, I got to sell assets.
Yeah.
And then sell them to somebody else that's willing to sit there and own something with no real cash flow.
Or they want to type a bunch of cash in real estate because they're in 1031.
So what happened in the meantime then?
Was it just like adjustable rate stuff that you borrowed on?
Or did you take on new loans?
I didn't fix my rate.
I was a big, fat, greedy pig.
And I didn't know the party was going to be over.
You didn't refinance when the rates were low?
Okay, I played a market.
Whatever LIBOR was or SOFA, I paid a bank a spread on whatever that rate is.
And that rate changes daily.
Okay.
And the rate was low for years and years and years.
okay so I just whatever the rate was you said it was 2.9 or something point two okay I was paying a
couple of percent for hundreds of millions of dollars I could have fixed it at three for how long
well with me five seven years long long it depends on a lease yeah every asset's different
in commercial real estate if it's a home depot it has another 15 years on it to go out 15 years really
wow if you have the money like I do to back it up I mean you know let's face it banks loan money
to people that have money.
They give the best rates to the people that don't need it.
Yeah, right.
Okay, so basically, I could have fixed my rates,
paid an extra point.
Let's say I was at two.
I could have paid an extra point and fixed it all for three.
Instead, now I'm paying six.
So I got greedy.
I should have said, you know what?
The shit could hit the fan.
Let me pay an extra point.
It would have cost me an extra couple of million a year,
but it protects me.
Well, now I got no protection,
and now I'm paying $6 million a year.
So that's life.
Did you...
By the way, did I tell you I'm selling my Rolls Royce?
He's looking to buy.
This one's the most luxurious one you can buy.
I've seen...
Brand new is $700,000.
It's the EWB extended.
I don't need that.
It's like a limo.
I don't need that in my life, no.
And mine is only two years old.
Has 5,000 miles on it.
It's the most beautiful,
luxurious car you can buy.
And you can get it for...
For you, today, the Graham Steffet's special is...
Tell me.
450
450.
No, I can't do 450
Graham, come on, man.
What about Alex?
This guy's loaded, right?
No, no, no.
Graves, you can actually fit in this car.
This is a car you could fit in.
Graham, you can't drive us around in the 4GT.
I'm tired of sitting like this.
I know you don't try to squeeze him in a fucking 4GT.
I can't do that.
All of Azaleen in the world is not getting you in a 4GT.
So did you just not expect the Fed to increase rates as fast as they did.
No, it is totally.
I mean, they didn't think about it.
No.
It's clearly shows
that they didn't take the time to think about what the repercussions are.
It clearly shows that they're not really business people, and I'm sorry.
I'm not really into politics because both of them have good and bad to them.
I'm not a Republican or Democrat.
I'm a little both.
I like the good in both of them.
But Democrats are typically not business people.
That's a fact.
Republicans are, and that's why you can't trust them.
So where are we living?
But I like to take the good from both and just somehow.
Now, I wish there was a party that just, they just did that.
But they can't because people are human.
And humans don't like to get along.
Now, what do you think right now about Dave Ramsey's approach?
I recently had him on the channel.
Is he a chef?
You're thinking of Gordon Ramsey.
Oh.
Dave Ramsey, the anti-debt guy.
Anti-debt guy.
Anti-de-de-guy.
He was wrong, but now he's right.
It goes into times.
Everything is a time you're in.
Everything's a market.
You got to go with the flow.
It's a roller coaster ride.
You know, and you got a ride.
ride that roller coaster and you have to adjust yourself to what the times are.
No, I never believed in all that.
I believed I would not be where I'm at today if it wasn't a debt.
If it wasn't a debt, I would have listened to my father and be a garbage man.
He wanted me to be a garbage man.
Hang on the back of a truck, pick up garbage.
He said, yeah, you're outdoors, you get good benefits.
They get a pension.
You live a good life being a garbage man.
But no, I wanted to go into real estate and the banks that would help me do it.
It's all their money, you know.
Yeah.
So you got to go into times.
Right now I'm thinking about writing a check for $100 million
of paying off $100 million worth of debt.
When I go home, I may do that.
But then I have to think about, well, if I do do that,
that will increase my cash flow, which will increase my taxes.
So me paying $100 million debt may not save me all the money.
I think it is because I'm in the 37% tax bracket.
So there's a lot of things to figure.
You have to look at your own situation
and figure out what's best for you.
Yeah.
Do you think it's worth it to buy right now in cash?
If you have the cash and you don't want to pay to bank 6% or 7%
and you can afford to part with the cash
and not leave yourself in a vulnerable position,
you know, cash is better now.
I don't want to pay the bank 6% to 7%,
but I may have to because I'm in 10.31.
There's a lot of different factors involved.
It's an equation.
You have to sit down and figure out what equation works for you.
Yeah.
Like you, how many bedrooms are empty right now?
Zero.
Zero bedrooms are empty.
Now, have you thought about splitting the bedrooms?
Making one bedroom into two bedrooms.
I like to bunk that idea.
How many bathrooms you got in this house?
One bathroom.
Five bedrooms.
One bathroom.
Get in mine.
Everybody gets a certain time they get to go to the bathroom.
Everyone gets a bucket.
A bucket.
That's better.
So how many bathrooms you got?
Three.
Three bathrooms.
Very good.
But to be frank, okay, so I bought this property only planning a moving in two people.
Just a friend and two friends.
I'm a friend of a friend.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That was my plan.
The only reason I was.
I got tenants in the other two rooms
is because I liked them.
The finances of it all sure, it's nice,
but at the same time, I figure in my own home,
the peace of mind being able to work,
work on this, make more money.
There's a higher ROI making sure I'm inspired
in my own home than there is another $800 or so a month.
Listen, it sounds like to me you're living for free,
which is a smart thing.
Thank you.
Now you've got to move to the next level
and get cash flow.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, if I go to move out, I would.
You can do like Germany did.
In Germany, it was crazy.
when you rent an apartment in Germany
everybody has to take a turn
helping keep in the place clean
like we live in these buildings
you've done in Poland too
the Europeans, they don't fuck around
he knows if you rent a, I rented a building
when I was a GI in a building
it was like one two, three, four, five, six apartments
and it was a staircase right?
Every week everybody had to take a different term
mopping the United States as part of the lease.
I love that.
If you guys are listening right now,
my housemates, I would love something like that.
You should definitely start telling everybody
everybody's got to take turns mowing the lawn
and cleaning the pool
and you eliminated two bills right there.
That's genius.
I'm not going to raise your rent,
but you got to start helping out around here.
I got a question,
because my next plan actually to be,
I haven't told Graham this,
but I want to buy property cash,
but I don't have enough money to do that.
I want to buy property cash,
but I ain't got no cash.
All right,
this guy's got a good plan.
That's a great plan.
Somewhere in the South or the Midwest,
somewhere over there.
Why?
Because I have enough cash to do it there.
Listen,
go a lot of places, but I put real estate for practically nothing still.
But you ain't going to want to go those places.
You know, why?
There's a reason why I did nothing.
Just like when I went to Texas, I bought 1,000 years 17 a door.
There was a reason why.
You can't keep 1,000 units full of your own goddamn competitor.
Plus, when immigration came in, half the tenants would move out and all the other issues.
I mean, it's all relative, you know.
You're going to pay more because you get more.
You're going to pay less because you get less.
That's the way everything works in life.
so and I don't see you traveling far away for what make a couple hundred bucks a month how much cash you got right now
tell the truth the whole truth nothing about the truth including the stuff in your pillow
up to you jack uh everybody get ready he's gonna tell us how much he's got cash just cash in the bank
money that you could if you cashed in every well if you liquid cash stock funds uh your coin
collection i don't know oh stock you're you're you would have to say thank god your your
what do you call it came back your your crypto came back
My stocks?
Your crypto came back.
I don't think you have any credit.
Jack sold.
No rich.
Rich relative, I just had teeth work done.
No rich relative has left you any money.
No.
So what do you got?
What do you got?
If I'm selling stock, are we talking in a Chase account?
How much money can you raise right now in cash?
600 grand.
600 grand.
Ooh, he didn't know that.
You're in trouble now, baby.
You're not getting paid.
Wait.
He's been stashed.
He's been stashed.
You've been to find out how much you're missing.
And who knows what he's sitting on over there, boy.
Stocks if I were to sell stock.
What?
How'd you get all that money?
No.
How'd you get all that money?
600 grand.
Guy like you, 24.
The podcast is this.
I'm,
I co-own it.
So it's a,
it's like a,
I created this with him.
So I would say it's all just,
a lot of its revenue from this.
And a lot,
I did make a good amount of money investing.
I got equity in my house,
which is nice.
I live frugally.
You can't you.
You count you're counting home equity.
No.
No.
No.
No.
If I were to...
It makes that much of a podcast.
You're fired.
You're hired.
If I were to...
The thing is, I don't have expensive...
I drive an old car.
I don't spend money.
That's good.
You're 24.
You shouldn't.
Yeah.
You know.
And, uh, I mean, so basically 600 grand.
I mean, you know, technically 600 grand is 25% down on what?
Six times four is, uh, 2.4 million.
So you could go out buy something for 2.4 million.
No. Why not?
It's a bad idea.
I think with a podcast.
Oh, it's a bad idea.
Extremely very.
A lot of these episodes, we would run like break-even or a slight loss just to be able to travel.
How did you get $600 grand? You want to figure that out.
I'd hire somebody to have it.
We got a friend of the investigator and find out.
If he's personally got $600 grand under his bill, you need to know why.
And check, see what's stolen around here.
That's, I mean, that's it.
I mean, if you do have $600 grand, but you think that you could go out and buy something two and a half million.
I feel like if I'm taking on that much debt, that's literally, I'm not saying you should, but let's say,
It was a deal of the century.
And a bank was willing to loan you to money.
You could.
I'm not saying you would.
But, you know, put it this way.
20% down, 25% down.
You can find a deal right now.
You got to look and make sure it's the right deal.
Maybe you guys should team up together.
I mean, he has like that times.
No.
No, no.
Yeah.
No partners for me.
There we go.
So that's it.
That's enough on my personal finances.
All right.
Okay.
I want to know more about your personal finances.
Because you are now losing six months.
million dollars a year just because of interest.
Can you tell us a little bit more about...
Basically, I got a portfolio and it's probably worth that I took everything I had all
together and threw it all in something.
Liquid assets, real estate, maybe 500 million.
But I owed a bank, half.
Yeah, okay.
That's my story.
But why not at this point sell off the 250, pay off the other loans?
The problem is.
The problem is.
Oh, you mean just pay off my...
loans and keep the assets? No, no, I'm talking about
selling enough to pay off all the loans. Because we have the evil devil called
basis. Ah, okay. And I've been 1031 in, sure, since I was in my 20s. So for 30 years,
I've been 1031, so my basis is very low. I can own a $20 million property. And my basis,
you know, basis means, I could be like a million. Sure. So therefore, if I sold it
but the 20 million with no profit even
I still got a $19 million
gain and tax on $19 million
of capital gains is 20%.
So 19 million would cost me about $4 million.
Plus I got recaptured depreciation.
It would be 24%
The net investment tax.
Because a bomber or something raised this?
Yep.
There's 3.8% on top of that.
That much.
Yeah, if you're cashing up more than a million dollars.
And then I may have to recapture the capital gains,
I mean, depreciation.
What I'm thinking about doing is I'm thinking about going out not selling my assets or even if I do I can still sell them and I'm going to do accelerated depreciation
You ever heard of that? I've heard of it. Yeah, don't know what it is.
Where I'm going to accelerate depreciation and get the right off now, but I'm not really paying much tax because I got no goddamn income because my interest rate went up so high
So that doesn't really make a lot of sense either but these are things not to look at but if I sell it by do the accelerated depreciation,
and I sell a property, I don't have to recapture it, because 1031, you don't have to recapture your depreciation, you defer it.
And everything gets deferred until I die.
Then my wife gets stepped up basis.
She lives happily ever after.
She marries some good look at 24-year-old like you, and she lives the rest of a life happy.
Now, what do you think about them wanting to get rid of the stepped-up tax basis?
I mean, even as it is right now, isn't that only up to the first?
He wants to get rid of the capital gain.
He wants to get rid of 1031, right?
I don't think they're going to do that.
I've seen that proposal, but they wanted to get rid of the stepped-up tax basis of,
upon death. They wanted, they wanted the tax basis to say the exact same. So when that person sells,
that would crush a lot of widows. But don't you feel like, because you'd have to raise the money to pay
the tax that sell property. No, but that's assuming they sell. And the tax bill could be more than the
gain. No, basically what they're saying is that your tax basis would transfer to, let's say,
your heir. And then if they were to sell, then they pay based on your tax basis of the property,
not theirs. That would be a lot more taxes than to pay. Correct. So they were to do it. If they were
to sell. They would end up with nothing. But that's if they were to sell. The best thing to do is if you
want to get rid of 1031, that's fine. If you want to get rid of it, but it's going to stop a lot
of growth. People aren't going to grow as much. And then you have to give me stepped up basis,
all right? Because at least I'll be saved. I'll just sell everything at stepped up basis and
not have to worry about paying taxes. I'm selling with the market prices. It's complicated.
What happened to one I had? What happened to want to had? You keep drinking. You keep drinking.
I think it all.
Oh, well, it's hot as fucking here.
You want, I didn't know this was going to be,
this ain't the fucking ice coffee.
This is the fucking hot box.
This is the fucking sauna hour.
Come hang out in Graham Steffin's sauna box.
So how much does it cost?
Because your house is massive.
What is the value of the house?
Right now, sell it at 30 million.
30 million.
No.
It costs 32 to build.
No.
I thought you, but you paid.
You bought it for 16.
Yeah, but I bought it from a wall player that lost his contract and his career is over.
and you need to sell it.
I bought it for 50 cents in a dollar.
I didn't want that house.
I hated that house.
I hate that house.
I like my old house.
It was a strictly investment.
But it was a 50 cents on a deal.
It was a brand new house.
50 cents in a deal.
Why not sell this house?
You can't find three lots in Bel Air Beach.
Impossible on the Gulf of Mexico.
Why not sell it and move to the other house?
My wife is offering me that opportunity,
but I don't want to move for a nice house with all the gadgets to some older house.
And then she doesn't want to tear that fucking house apart and drive me nuts,
fixing it up.
It's not for me.
I rather just,
my house I could sell for third.
The Scientologist offered me 29 once, I think.
Really?
When to use it as one of their headquarters?
I don't know.
Who don't know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But anyway, my house should be worth about $30 million,
even a bad market.
So what's that cost just off of like the...
Three lots.
Yeah.
But like...
$20,000 square feet, in and out.
The, like, if you're,
if you're talking about, like, all of the variable expenses
of owning a $30 million house.
Luckily, I was the only thing I was smart on was my mortgage.
I fixed my rate at 2%.
I got a mortgage on my house.
I got 80% jumble loan to 2% fixed rate for like 15 years.
15 years.
Interest only, baby.
Oh,
wow.
And the other house,
I got 1.87 on that other house.
It's my second home.
So what's your payment every month on that?
Well, 2% on about,
I bought the house $16 million,
put $20% on out, put about $3 million down,
oh, $15 million.
Right, no.
$16 million from $3.13 million times 2%.
It's about $20,000 a month.
and then I got housekeep
Yeah 20 grand away
Get a calculator at
What's your phone at
13 million
Yeah you're right
Times 2% divided by 12
It's about 20 grand a month
Yeah
But then you know
It's probably taxis
Yeah
You gotta heat the pool
Taxes kick my ass
Taxes are about
130, 40, 40 grand a year
or more
That's still not terrible
About a percent
But what about insurance right now?
Well because it's not valued at
It's valued at
What he paid to build it
And he didn't tell him what he paid to
build it.
Anyway, it's, you know, altogether, you know, it probably costs me about whatever,
$40,000 a month to live there with housekeepers and utilities.
I'm bad at all.
I lowered my landscaping bill.
I swear to God, I hated my landscaper.
He was going to be fucking, oh, we got a place this, we got to fix that.
It is bullshit.
I got rid of my landscaper.
I replaced all the lawns with fake grass, and I love it.
I gave my kid that a put-put-pug thing, and I cut out the fucking landscaper.
I fired the pool company, got the guy from a hotel.
It does my Clear Beach Hotel come do it.
I've been cutting expenses.
What about insurance?
Because I heard Florida.
We just renewed.
I only renewed it for $5.5 million worth damage.
Okay.
So my insurance is like $24,000 a year.
My son just called me today on it.
And then flood is,
I mean, flood is a maximum way you get on flood anyway.
Sure.
You know.
And then the house is built to where if it floods,
all the walls, somehow, I don't know,
something happens where it protects the house.
Only the lower level.
Only the bowling alley and he gets destroyed.
Got it.
Huh.
That's good.
know only the bowling alley I don't fucking hear about the bowling alley a bunch of shoes
and a couple of lanes of bowling when's the last time you used the bowling alley in your house
the last time the last time is when I pulled my back out from bowling so it's been a while
I don't do I used to bowl as a kid but no it's for kids so how many square feet is the house
20,000 in the 20,000 patio okay so 40,000 square feet what percent square feet not heated sure
well the garages are air conditioning here but they don't count
What percent of this 40,000 square foot place do you think you actually use most?
200.
The bed?
No.
I mean, my bedroom, you know, it's pretty big, but, you know, the bedroom.
I basically live in my bedroom and my office.
Is the elevator kind of square footage?
Yeah.
I use the elevator all right.
I use the office.
He's the elevator and then she calls me and they eat.
And otherwise, the rest of the houses for the kids.
That's crazy because for me, I just wonder like, why would anyone need that big house?
But it was a deal, baby.
It's my, it's my like insurance policy.
If all shit goes to hell, I could put on the market tomorrow.
I know I get at least 28 even in this market.
I only paid, I only get older bank.
How much?
I said 13.
I could go get 15 million bucks if I need out of my house.
That makes sense.
It was investment, you know.
Can you tell us the details about the plane you bought?
Because you bought a new plane, didn't you recently?
I own partnerships.
I'm a partner in about three different planes.
Sure.
Okay.
I don't want to own my own plane.
It's just crazy.
The bills, one part broke the other day was 20 grand,
and that was a cheap part.
I mean, basically, I have partners,
and none of us ever have any conflicts with using them.
You know, you want to use the plane?
You call up the guy to man and say, hey,
I want to use the plane, go here, go there, whatever.
And then we all share in the maintenance costs every month.
We all share, where you pay whatever hours you use,
you know, whatever partner uses X amount of hours,
pays the hourly engine service based on his hours.
As soon as you're done using the pain,
you've got to write a check to the pilots and the gas
and any other fees,
and landing fees.
And then if it breaks,
we're all going to split the bill.
Yeah.
I've got four guys split the bill with when it comes to him.
We got to get our damn plane painted the other day.
It costs like 80 grand.
Yeah, because it's a special type of paint, right?
It has to get approved in those little process.
They claim that the reason why is because my plane,
my plane,
the one we're talking about is a,
who's everyone here?
He knew all this shit.
it's a what's it called beach jet premiere okay and it's made out a compound or pounds pose anyway it's not like a metal plane
had to go so much special blah blah blah blah blah for cracks cost 80 grand pain a fucking plane you could
have done it for 20 but yeah yeah could have well if it was a regular plane and if i used a local yokel but
they want to go a big shot place and all that anyway so at least it cost me 20 out of the 80 because
they got four partners three other partners how much was the plane we paid about a million a half for
We didn't pay much.
The guy that's one of my partners
is like an expert in buying shit,
car, you don't have to an auction business.
One plane costs a million and a half.
The other one costs like a million eight.
The other one's a G100.
I never used because it's too expensive.
It takes two pilots.
The Premier only takes one pilot,
and it's for long distance.
But certain partners use
certain planes more depending on the lifestyle.
But I got that,
and then I got the prop plane,
the 414 that I use now
because I'm being a cheap skate,
and I make my kids use that to bounce around Florida.
But that's not only good for,
Florida.
I saw a clip of you breaking your private jet.
No, you probably saw the prop plane where I got on and it tilted down.
That was that was for the clip.
That was for the TikTok clip right there.
My question was for that.
Yeah, yeah, could you elaborate?
What was that?
Elaborate?
Well, the guy or something, I don't know,
maybe he didn't have the plane blocked right or whatever.
Or maybe there's a certain way you're supposed to load a plane.
But when I got on a plane, the whole front went up.
And it was true.
It happened.
It did damage?
No, it didn't know damage.
None?
No.
It just tilted in the bottom, the tail hits the ground.
I mean, you didn't go with something as delicate as a plane that that would, like, incurs.
Plains aren't that delicate to me.
It's like cars, like aluminum of metal, sheet metal, whatever.
I mean.
Could you just get someone in the front of the plane, too?
Like load an extra few people to sit in front.
Balance it or no.
We balance when we sit in the plane.
Normally we make it or fall.
Sit with the pilot up front.
Two planes.
So how much would it cost you then to make the average trip on a plane like that?
Basically, what I do a lot is I go to Fort Lauderdale, which is about 250 miles.
If I take the prop plane, I got to pay for a pilot.
He's about $800 a day, even if he's only working two hours.
You got to pay him for a day.
So you got $800 for the pilot, okay?
And then it's going to run me about, in that plane, it's going to run me $500 in gas to go $250
miles in the prop plane and $500 back in fuel.
So I got $1,000 in fuel, and I got $800 of the pilots, $1,800.
If I take the Premier Jet, it's going to be about $700 more for the fuel.
And if I take the G100, it's going to be about $17,000 more because you use more fuel and then you're another pilot.
That's interesting.
It's the same distance between here in L.A.
Yeah.
Every plane is different, you know.
But then you've got the engine hours.
You got to pay for two.
But we do some dry leasing, which helps with the expenses.
You know, we'll do like dry leasing.
We have a manager handles all that.
So we were discussing before this podcast about how you negotiate absolutely every thing in your life, right?
From cars to houses to the sentence that you're going to receive when you're 17.
Can you tell me other random stuff that you've negotiated?
You said you can negotiate for anything and people overlook that.
I mean, I will try to negotiate and take advantage of anything.
You know, I mean, all right, some place you can't, you know, but like, you know, if I'm in the grocery store and, you know, I really don't want to buy the kid to bag of candy,
they want, I'll accidentally open it a little.
Hey, this is open. Can I get it for half price?
You know, or we went to the buffet or the restaurant and the Velazio and, you know, my niece
is really 15, but I said she was 10.
It's half price.
That's smart.
I do that stuff.
She don't eat much.
She eats the same as a 10-year-old.
It shouldn't go by the age.
It should go by size.
If you're a small person and you eat light, then you should be charged by your weight.
Should you pay double?
him they'll pay fucking 10 times the price of the buffet i would they fucking probably cry if they saw you walk in a
fucking buffet holy shit i know some chinese guys that would close their shop if they thought he was
coming in there coming to the chinese buffet in my neighborhood you know my son got kicked out of a
chinese buffet once no he did it how did he ate too fucking much and what did that go like for him
what happened was i put him in charge of a palm building when he was like 19 he drunk out of college
and I said, go to this a palm building
I'm not paying for your tuition no more.
You're not doing shit in college.
You fucked off the first year and party.
Go work this building at Grymore in Florida.
And I wasn't even living there yet.
I recently started buying palm buildings.
So he goes to the palm building.
So he's in there, he's managing a building.
And every month you get all the rents, you know,
all the time rents come in.
Back then, we didn't have to eat it.
I don't know why, but he was doing all by hand deposits back then.
We're talking 2004.
All right, he was doing hand deposits on a ticket
with all the rents and stamping the,
checks and all that shit. It's a lot of time writing the shit in the deposit ticket,
stamp in the check, getting the bank deposit ready to go. So what he would do is around the
corner of the building was a Chinese buffet. And he would come in there like around
right before lunch was over, maybe like two o'clock or something like that. And then they,
they were open, you know, through dinner. He's coming here at two o'clock and he's a big kid,
you know, he can eat. And he goes and he's sitting there doing his work and he stayed there for
hours doing his work and while he's working he keeps going back and forth eating and the guy goes
you come for lunch you stay for dinner you get out and he got kicked out and he got kicked out and I had to go to
get him get him come back in because he loved the place plus he get his work done there and he obviously
wouldn't get shit done because you know we had food nearby we didn't work that is hilarious
that's genius but now they have time limits now they all say 60 to 90 minutes yeah this is back
I'm talking in 2004.
That's smart.
I've never gone this long without a fucking cigarette.
A lot of people commented about you smoking.
And that was one of the most recurring comments that I got.
When are you going to quit smoking?
You just brought up smoking.
I will quit when I die.
It will kill me.
Seriously, I started smoking a pack a day when I was 12 years old.
Well, maybe it wasn't a pack of 12, but I was smoking at 12.
Okay.
And then by I know by 16, 15, 15.
15, 14, I know it's back a day.
I remember the little Puerto Rican place I used to go to get him
through a bulletproof glass and you guy would sell me a pack of Newport when I was 14
living in Hell's Kitchen of Manhattan.
I've been smoking so I was 14 and it's very addictive and I can't quit.
If I quit, I'd probably kill people.
But, you know, I mean, I don't think I even have to try.
You don't think you can't.
But I got a clean bill of health and I went to a Mayo Clinic with my lungs and everything.
I don't think I quit.
Hell, no.
It's a drug.
It's addictive.
It's nicotine.
You know, it's like you trying to quit heroin.
It ain't going to happen.
If I keep trying, I bet you could.
I think a lot of people are just genuinely concerned about your heroin.
But my body might go into shock and say, what the fuck's going on?
I ain't got no nicotine in me.
He really kill me.
Well, you could do is take like little nicotine patches.
Oh, I try to add patches.
I had so many fucking patches on and the shit didn't work.
And then you smoke while you got the patches on, you get really fucked up.
I have given myself nicotine poisoning before.
That's when I know.
Well, I could feel it.
I can say, okay.
I gotta stop smoking for at least five minutes.
What's that feel like?
What, nicotine?
It makes you sick.
You know, you pretty much get sick to your stomach.
You know, but I mean, I'm addicted to it, you know, and...
What does it feel like?
I've never smoking a cigarette.
Oh, my God, it's the best.
It's great.
What is it?
Let me say, after you have a fucking meal or you get laid, you got to have a fucking cigarette.
You haven't lived until you had to say...
And then if you have a menthol, and if you haven't had a menthol,
Well, you really haven't lived.
I'm sorry.
But what does it feel like?
What does that feel like?
Like, how does it...
Have you ever got high?
Let's be honest.
Come on.
Let's be honest.
All right.
I don't know.
You want to be honest or not.
I don't know.
Have you ever got high?
You know what's like smoking weed?
I hated it.
I smoked weed maybe two to three times in my life.
It's not your personality.
I couldn't stand it.
But for the personality, the person to enjoy me.
Oh, man.
They enjoy it.
But smoking cigarettes, it's an addictive habit.
But it does relax me, it calls me down.
Because,
be something, you know. I don't know. It's just part of me. And it may not be part of you or it
couldn't be part of you, but it's part of me. I don't like to smell a cigarette. But I'm just trying
to think like, but the feeling and the sensation. Okay, so what I would understand it is like,
similar to caffeine. That's what I think is in. Caffeine, you drink coffee. I do. I love
coffee. Well, there you go. Same thing. You get that kind of feeling. It's hard to explain.
Yeah. You get this feeling in the morning. When you wake up, do you need a cup of coffee?
I do. Me too. I love it. I wake up. My wife's got a cup right by my bed. I need it. I need it.
It just gets me going.
It gets my brain going.
The cigarette's the same thing.
I can't believe I sat here
this long run out of cigarette.
I mean, I can.
You know, I go on airplanes.
She's maybe going to fucking Dubai.
That took fucking 20-something hours
in those cigarettes.
And then what's the feeling like after,
like, let's say, an hour and a half, two hours?
You have a cigarette.
You ready for another one, maybe.
But how does it come up?
Is it just like just an urge
where it's just like a...
Yeah, it's an urge.
Hey, I mean, you have a cigarette.
Let me tell you, if you drink an alcohol,
I don't drink, but people that drink sometimes
only smoke. I don't know how they do it. Our friends
they only smoke when they drink.
I have friends like that. Lots of people my age
like they don't smoke casually, but if they
drink, it's like they need a cigarette. And what's up
with the whole new thing with the fucking vaping?
I think they say that the two is a vapor. I can tell
he's a vapor. I'm not a vapor. No, I've never
had a cigarette and I don't, I don't, I don't
vape, absolutely not.
I don't like, I don't smoke things.
I don't smoke things. I'll smoke things.
I'll drink. No, I'll drink. I'll drink.
I'll drink. I'll drink. I'll smoke on
things, but I won't smoke things.
No, I don't know.
It's just, I get, it kind of makes me nervous.
Listen, we're all human beings.
We all have different lives to live.
You do whatever, you know, fits your lifestyle.
I overeat.
I'm trying to cut down on that because I don't look like him.
Overeating, you know, eating, smoking, drinking, devices.
These are things.
Everybody's an individual.
You have a right to do what you want.
But, you know, some people are drug addicts.
Some people smoke too much pot.
Some people snort too much coat.
Some people smoke cracks.
Some people shoot heroin.
It goes on and on and on.
And now we got pills.
Pills you do.
I know you're a pill popper.
I don't do drugs.
Pills?
Honestly, it's good you don't do drugs.
You've got enough problems already.
They're not going to help you.
I mean, you know, it is what it is.
You know, I grew up in an environment.
Everybody smoked around me, and I started smoking.
You know, a lot of it's a product of your environment when you're young.
You know, that's what I tell my kids, if you hang out with losers, you're going to be a loser.
Because, you know, you're a product of your environment.
Yeah.
I agree.
Yeah.
I got another random question if you're comfortable answering.
So you've had, what, two wives, three wives?
I don't want to talk about too much about women.
My wife is very jealous and hates the past.
But anyway, I'm on my third wife.
You had a problem with that, buddy?
This doesn't have to be about your past relationships.
I'm just curious because you've been.
But I'm done now.
You've been through relationships.
This is the only real one.
The one I'm in now is really the only one I consider a real relationship.
But I'm sure through failures you've learned a lot.
I mean, I didn't have a quarter of those nights.
What are you going to do?
You didn't what?
Call?
I didn't have a quarter of some of those nights.
nights. I had two kids. I didn't hear you. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. But like what have you
learned? Like what works out? I guess Jack's asking for relationship advice. Relationship advice.
Just generic. You got to find somebody that matches you. It's like if my wife was a go getter or
a money maker, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. I mean, it just wouldn't. Opposites actually
do well. And tracked. Okay. But it's whenever it works for you, you know, if you feel like you're
compatible with somebody and you're attracted to them, it works. You just got to stay away from people that are
going to hurt your life. My wife brought my life stability. My wife brought my life stability.
She stayed at home. She took care of kids. You raised a family. She did all the things I needed to do.
She took care of me as a husband. You know, I pay a price for it. I pay dearly. But, you know,
anyway, you know, but it worked for me. You know, if I had a career wife, it wouldn't be the same.
I wouldn't have the quality of life if I had a wife that wasn't worried so much about the quality
of our life.
So, you know,
whatever fits your lifestyle,
whatever your knees are,
you know,
you might want to go
I'm, by the way,
I said earlier this podcast.
You might want to go to a mental hospital.
I said earlier this podcast,
I'm gay, I'm not gay.
So I just wanted,
I forgot to clarify that.
You know, listen,
whatever it makes you happy,
I don't care.
Hold on a second.
I don't want people in college
getting some sort of idea.
I don't want to tell them
about the Instagram thing.
Listen, I'm going to tell you right now,
being by is still being gay.
I'm not by.
No.
I want to tell them about the Instagram thing.
So I posted,
I think three years ago, we were looking for a date for Jack on the podcast.
And I posted it on Instagram.
I said, DM Jack, if you're single, you want to come on the podcast, be his blind date.
90% guys.
No, it was like all guys.
I don't even know if we got a single girl.
And this was, it was up for like 20 minutes.
We got like 18.
Yeah, but what's your audience?
Your audience is supposed to go.
Exactly.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Okay.
It depends.
I mean, you know, what kind of girl are you want?
You know, what do you want?
You want somebody's educated?
You want somebody's a doctor?
You can probably go.
a doctor if you want. There's plenty of women doctors out there.
You know, you want a woman's going to blush you around? What do you want? You want a woman that's
going to cater all your needs or baby you? What do you want? You got to find what you want.
What are you like? What are you like? It's all about what you like. Then that somebody has to
fit that piece in that puzzle. That's interesting. That's really a pretty simple advice.
You have to do you're creating your life when you get involved with somebody. They have to
fit your life. They have to be the right piece for that puzzle. You know?
And then you'll be happy.
Huh.
Hopefully.
What do you want, Jack?
Do you know?
What do I want?
Yeah.
I don't, like as far as characteristics in a girl.
Yeah.
Like,
I got to be fit, number one.
I insist on a woman that's fit.
No,
that honestly doesn't matter that much to me.
Honestly,
the main thing is I like girls that are smart.
Somebody that I can have like some good banter with.
That for me is very important.
I don't.
You don't want someone that's smart.
No.
And that's crazy because I want,
well, it's not crazy.
It's just different.
I'm just one enough of both of us.
My wife,
whenever we get into a fight,
he always says,
We get into a fight.
All couples do.
I know, I know.
You're the smart one.
I'm the dumb one.
I'm the dumb one.
And then what do you say?
What do you say to that?
I say shit, she said it all.
Oh, my gosh.
Can I ask what you guys fight about?
Or like, what's an...
Always stupid shit or always other people.
The only problems we got in our relationship is other people.
Other people, other family members, or this and that.
It's never us.
It's always some nonsense that has to do with somebody else that we shouldn't even be dealing with.
you know that's why we started saying
now on the less we know about people are better
you know just just whatever we don't want to know
is there anything else you want to mention all right here
I mean you know I've been fired from every job I've ever had in my life
the army they were willing to keep me but
they weren't offered me a great deal you know
and before I went in the army you know
I hung around with a bunch of you know in the neighborhood you can't help it
you know I lived in a bar in Brooklyn for a while
when I was like 16 and it was the
typical bar where all the gumbas
or whatever gangsters hung out
and then they had these, you know, apartments above them.
That's the way. It is in Brooklyn. So we lived in this
apartment. It was just me and my sister at the time.
We lived in an apartment over the bar. You know, you hang out
in the neighborhood, you know. You ever see like the movies
like Goodfellas with a kid? Yeah, yeah.
You're hanging out, you know.
So anyway, long story short,
I started hanging out with somebody younger guys, you know,
not the older guys, you know. And I hang around, they'd get to see me
around and say, hey, you know, and
so I figured what the hell
I ain't doing shit
I need to make some money
so I went in there and the guy says
you know
the guy his name was chubby
he was a you know
Italian you know whatever
he was like what they call the guy in that area
that ran shit you know
captain whatever you want to call him
and he's sitting the back of the bar
and he was a loan shark he'd loan people money
he'd take bets he was a bookie
and that was the guy you went to in that area
if you wanted to borrow money or you need a
on a horse or whatever
so he didn't care for me for some reason
And I think because he knew I wasn't stupid.
You know, ignorant people don't like smart people, you know.
It's just the way it is.
It makes them feel stupid, you know, as they are.
So anyway, Chubby goes to me one day and he says, hey, you know, go pay a visit to this guy.
He owes me a thousand bucks.
And the guy was a degenerate gambler, you know, he bent on horses and sports or whatever.
And he owed Chubby your money.
And he tells me where the guy lives and everything.
And so I go over there.
and it was a similar type building,
you know, shitty old apartments,
and I knocked at the guy's door.
And I walked in there,
and, you know, it was total,
he had a big bottle of Cuddy Sark,
and all of you ever seen Cuddy Sark.
It was a bottle of liquor.
It was commonly drunk and back then,
and he had a big bottle there,
and he was sitting on those stupid folding tables.
You ever see those stupid old tables
you put out in front of the TV on?
Yeah, sure, yeah.
And he had a whole black and white TV
with the fucking Dobbs on.
And we're talking back in, you know, 80s with the rabid ears and shit.
And he's sitting there.
And he had a big belly with a white, white beaded t-shirt on.
He was a slob.
And it looked like a fucking wreck.
And he was always drunk.
So I come over there, I says, hey, Chubby sent me over here.
You know, you got any money for him.
I don't know.
You act like a tough guy.
I don't go no money.
And he was just a real pain-de-ass guy.
I don't get no money.
But act like a big shot, tough guy.
Listen.
Who are you kidding?
These guys are going to come over here and break your fucking arm
if you don't pay him somebody.
Here, I almost felt sorry for a guy
because I knew that if I came back with nothing,
they were going to hurt this guy.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so I'm telling the guy,
I say, listen, you got to have something or somebody.
Call somebody.
Call a relative.
Give me something to go back to this guy.
Give me 500 bucks, 300 bucks, something.
All right, give me something.
You know, you're going to,
anything. No, I got nothing. All I got is this beat up whole fucking cutlass outside.
You know, they ain't started, it ain't ran in years. Anyway, give me the keys.
I was into cars, okay? I hung out with Puerto Ricans. We'd take cars like that.
Anyway, I had new friends that could fix a car and fix almost anything pretty much. So,
give me the keys to the fucking car. I like cars, too. So I went down there, I looked at a cutlass,
and I was very familiar with cutlasses because I've taken many of them. I borrowed many of them.
So fucking thing's dead.
You know, I ain't been touched in a fucking year.
I call my friend Edwin up.
He's a Puerto Rican guy who used to hang out with.
Edwin, come over here and help me, please.
Take a look at this car.
Maybe we can make some money on it.
I don't know.
Everyone comes over there.
And we ended up changing the battery.
I bought a used battery.
It cost me like 20 bucks.
We put oil in it.
We put water in it.
We put, and he may have changed the spark plug or two
or something like that.
when got the fucking thing started.
And it wasn't that bad of shape.
It was just stopped running.
And the idiot just, you know,
just left in and care.
He ain't going to wear anyway.
You ain't got to money going to wear.
So we get the fucking thing running.
Give me the fucking title for it.
He gives me the title of the car.
I go to another place I know,
the junkyards.
And, you know, they bought cars like that.
I go to the car.
And it was actually a decent car once we put a fucking hose to it
and got it running.
So we look at the junkyard.
the guy says, I'll give you a grand.
The guy gives me a thousand bucks
of the fucking car.
Wow.
I take the thousand bucks.
I go back to Chubby,
I give him the envelope with thousand bucks in it.
Ten, one hundred dollar bills.
And he was totally just blown away.
How the fuck did you get the money out of that deadbeat?
He knew I couldn't get the money.
He set me up to lose.
He set me up for failure.
So I give him the fucking money.
How do you fuck do you get that money out of that deadbeat?
So I tell him the whole story.
Well, you know, he said he had a car.
I took the car.
I went and bought a battery.
We put oil in it.
We put water.
We fixed it up.
My friend fixed it up.
We took it.
We sold it to another guy.
He knew the guy sold it to because they're all connected.
And I got $1,000 and there you go.
The guy sit there and he just listened to my story.
Look to me.
And he says, get the hell out of here.
You're not right for this business.
What?
He wanted me to hurt the guy.
Oh, geez.
And because I went to all that trouble.
I lost money.
I bought the fucking battery
in the water or the oil, whatever,
or the water,
but I ended up losing
50 bucks, 30 bucks,
whatever it was in those days
to fix the fucking car
to get him his fucking money back
and he says, get out of here.
You're not rife at his type of business.
He'd rather, I hurt the guy or some shit,
but he thought,
he couldn't believe I went to all this trouble
and figured out and went to all that
to get his fucking money.
It didn't make sense to him.
Holy crap.
Anyway, he saved my life.
Yeah.
So that was my mafia story.
I never got.
I always stayed away from those guys.
I happen for a reason.
Jeez.
That's it.
Cool.
I like that.
Finding a silver lining to a pretty crazy story.
You never know it in the moment, but looking back, that is remarkable.
Yeah.
That's it.
Well, thanks so much, man.
Thank you.
It's been a blessing.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, bud.
You don't say, Kansigal, do this.
Do that.
Do that punch to this.
All right.
Here, here you got me.
Here, here.
You.
Guys, check out Lexar, please, right there.
Thanks, Ben.
Hey, and by the way, if you want to see videos about real estate, what I'm doing every day, go to YouTube, Ben Mala.
Check out life is there.
Oh, go to Ben Mallow.com slash shopping, consult with Ben.
You got a deal, you got a problem, get me on the phone, let's talk about it's working out.
Thank you so much, man.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
